How did you first hear about Mike Sword’s death?

It was in our newspaper, and it was reported widely. Even when stories came out that proved that the police had acted appropriately – there were even follow-up stories where they won awards for valor – you never got a sense of what really happened with him. People just assumed it was PTSD, but it was never brought up.

Then I did a story about a woman soldier who had been a prison guard at Abu Ghraib right after the big ruckus there. And she had PTSD. She was one of the first to come back and really get involved with the VA community, so writing about her was a great way of writing about the VA. She was buddies with all these old vets from World War II, a guy from D-day. But she had a lot of problems, and one of the things that she and the vets focused on was Sword’s story. You could tell it was really powerful in the vet community. “What happened with him?” “I’m sure it was PTSD.” And they would tell their own stories about hearing a lawn mower and ducking behind the bushes.

I mentioned Mike Sword’s death in writing about Debbie (Camicia), and his sister contacted me. She was trying to come to grips with what had happened and wanted to know if Debbie would speak with her. I followed up with her to see if she would be willing to tell her story, and she said no.

Fast forward a few years to last year: We wanted to do a story on PTSD. The guy I was initially following was a National Guardsman from an hour away. He was really suffering. He was on full disability, with back issues and PTSD. I spent a lot of time with him, and he eventually decided it was too painful to discuss. His wife said, “After you leave, he’s a mess.” Of course that makes you feel horrible.

So my story backed out, and a couple other reporters were working on other stories. And in the meantime, Mr. Sword’s father contacted our top editor. He wanted an anniversary of 9/11 piece honoring all the fallen heroes, including his son, who he thought was a fallen hero because of his PTSD. Finally, we got our chance to tell the story.

You were trying to get different sides of Sword’s character from family members who are estranged from each other. Have you ever had to deal with that before?

I don’t think so. It was to the point that one family member would tell me not to talk to another one because they had already asked, and that person didn’t want to talk to me. But I would call to confirm it, because I needed to hear it from them, and they would say, “No, I want to talk to you.”

The deeper I dug, the sadder it got. Then you think, “Is it worth it as a story?” You want to inform the public, but are you stirring up too much pain?

The story has a classic narrative structure: You start in the present to let people know there was a shootout, then you cycle back through Sword’s life, bit by bit to the tragedy and then the present again. Was that the structure you always had for the piece?

I knew the whole thing was building up to the really intense shooting scene. So much of my reporting had to focus on that. A lot of those details hadn’t been reported before, because the police were really shut down about what they’d give out.

The first thing I did was to file an FOI request. I asked for everything and got an official form letter back, citing this clause saying, “We’re not going to give you anything, because it’s ‘still under investigation’ ” – even though it wasn’t. It was just this clause they were using. I checked with FOI officials statewide, and they really can say that – even though the subject is dead, even though it’s clearly not under investigation. It’s a loophole.

But the nice thing was that the police said, “We don’t want to be jerks about this. We’ll meet with you.” I met with them four times. Each time, the main policeman would have his laptop there, with all the information on it. He would stop and consult with the PR person and say, “Can I tell her this?” They gave me a few details that weren’t released at the time.

Then through reporting, I would go back in and say, “Well, I learned this.” And they would say, “We forgot to tell you that.” Once I said, “Why didn’t you tell me this?” and the police officer said, “Well, you didn’t ask.” So I told him that story about Edna Buchanan, and I said, “I don’t know exactly what I want to know. But I want details that will allow me to build a really rich narrative.”

They kept talking about “the loud music, the loud music.” I said, “What kind of music? Was it heavy metal?” This guy says, “I don’t know. It was just really loud and horrible music, but they left it on for a long time because it was crime scene.” I said, “But what was it?” One of the policemen said, “No, it wasn’t heavy metal, it was hard rock.” When I finally got the cop who fired the fatal shot, he said, “I’ll never forget that song. It was Buckcherry’s ‘Crazy Bitch.’ ”

That policeman was another person – almost nobody wanted to talk to me for this story, which makes you feel bad. But this policeman had initially agreed to “work with me.” I said, “What do you mean by that?” He said, “I’ll talk to you, but I don’t know if I want you to use everything. I’ll work with you.” The idea was that I would go over with him what I was going to use ahead of time, but we didn’t get into specifics about on the record/off the record on the phone, because I was going to do that when we met.

And then he kept cancelling. And then we were Facebook friends, and he would contact me that way. Then he unfriended me and cut off all connection. And then as I was getting ready to polish up the draft, I just wrote to him on Facebook, I sent him a message, which you can still do if you’re not friends.

I said, “Per our initial agreement that I would work with you, I’d like to talk to you about what I’m going to use from you for our first couple of phone conversations.” I kind of acted like I had forgotten that he had unfriended me, but that got his attention. Once he called me and we started talking, he was just full of questions about what this guy was like. Then he spelled out everything the other police wouldn’t tell me: just exactly how it went, exactly where the cars were located. He was very open, as if he had really needed to talk about it.

In the end, he thanked me and said it had really helped him process what was going on with him, but he said, “All my friends told me not to talk with you.”

Since this was part of a larger multimedia project that the paper did, how much background about PTSD did you feel you needed to include? How did you think about it?

Well, I knew Sarah (Bruyn Jones) was writing about the science of PTSD, and I knew she was also looking at specific changes at the Salem VA. I talked to the people at the VA several times. They’re not very media friendly. I have an old friend who’s the director of mental health there, and he wants to help, but he’s like, “We’re just not allowed to talk to you unless a PR person is here with us. We can’t send a vet to you, even if they want to talk.”

It’s really hard to get in there. So I did a lot of hanging out at the VA. There’s a plant nursery there, where the veterans, as part of their therapy, work on growing plants, and they sell them. And I’m a huge gardener. So a lot of times, when I’m looking for a story or I need to write something about the vets, I just go hang out at the nursery, and I meet people. And one thing will lead to another. And I actually ended up contributing some of the reporting to her story based on conversations I had with vets I met at the nursery. It’s a huge complex – just giant.

One time some guy was supposed to meet me, and I got out there to find a note posted on a picnic shelter, just a piece of white paper with handwriting, “Dear lady at The Roanoke Times. I’m sorry I can’t meet you today.” I didn’t have his phone number, but he was in treatment there, and he said, “Call me back at this number at such and such a time.” He didn’t have my number either.

That informed my work with my story, but I was also helping her out a little bit too. I was casting my net wide, especially at the beginning. I did a lot of interviews in February, when I thought I was writing about the other vet.

I don’t know that very much of what I learned (about PTSD) is actually in this story. Knowing that she was writing the bulk of what was going on with the science and at the VA allowed me to concentrate on the narrative instead.

You raise some questions early on that in the end can’t be resolved, because Mike Sword is dead. Can you talk about how you decided to navigate that in terms of your storytelling?

It was disappointing that I couldn’t know, but I think I was also pretty careful not to act like I was going to answer the questions at the end. There’s nothing more frustrating than that – you’re sort of robbing the reader. The question to me is, what should we have done differently? That to me was something the family of a veteran would take away from it. I had to deal with the facts I had. It’s still really, really sad.

It’s not like you’re promising something that isn’t delivered. It’s like you’re leaving it for the rest of us to determine if we need to be doing more. Is there something that could have stopped this?

I got to watch the father come to that realization. At the end, he said, “We should have been circling the wagons.” I had been hanging out with him off and on for a couple months by the time he came to that realization. He lives in Virginia Beach, so I didn’t actually hang out with him, but we would meet every couple of weeks to go over what I had learned.

He had the motivation that he wanted a reporter to do this big investigation and find out that the police improperly shot his son. When I finally was able to see the video of what happened, it was not a good video, because it was from the car farthest away.

The police finally let me see it the fourth time I asked, and only because through reporting, I learned that what they had told me in my initial meeting with them didn’t jibe with what family lawyers told me. The policeman, trying to be helpful, said, “When you watch the video, you can see Mike getting out of the truck and shooting at the officers.” He was really specific about that. I recorded all the interviews, because I knew it could all be contentious. So I knew he had said that.

But everybody else specifically remembered that you couldn’t see that. I said, “Chuck, you’ve got to let me watch that video. I don’t want this to be some kind of problem in the story: ‘So and so says this’ and ‘so and so says that,’ but I can’t see the video, so there’s just one big other mystery that I can’t answer.” He said, “Okay,” and he went down and watched it in the basement archives.

He came back and said, “I am so sorry. They are right. I was wrong. I was misremembering.” It had been a couple years. And he said, “We’re going to let you watch it.” Once I saw it – and they let me watch it as many times as I wanted – you don’t actually see Mike, because it’s dark and he’s too far away. But what you do see is the police officers walking. They’ve got their hands on their guns, they don’t have their guns drawn yet. And all of the sudden sparks are flying. You know they’re being shot at before they even had their weapons drawn.

To me that kind of answered the major question, because once you open fire like that, they have to shoot you. So I called Mr. Sword’s dad and said, “I know this isn’t what you want to hear. But I saw the video, and to me it’s really clear.”

What I think the story suffers from the most is that it doesn’t feel very intimate. To me, it doesn’t sound like me, the way I write. There’s too much attribution in it. I got one conversation with the wife, who spent more time with him than anyone. Of course I never got to talk to him. I talked to as many people as I could who would talk to me about him. I’m not sure you have a huge sense of who he is. Some of this stuff about their relationship – I had some stuff on the record, a lot of stuff off the record, but some stuff I had was just too painful to put it in. The last conversation they had, I chose not to put it in. I just thought it was too painful. The reader didn’t need to read it, and the widow didn’t need to read it.

Do you have any advice for anyone else trying to tackle a story like this?

I don’t want to do another story like this for the rest of my career. It’s an honest and true story. It’s not a complete story, because of not being able to talk to some people. I think the complete story would probably be even harder to tell.

Talking to that policeman, I could tell the first time I talked to him that he really wanted to talk … but that was months of trying to coax him and being pushier than I’m normally comfortable being. Still, I think it added a lot to the story to have his point of view.

Every detail just makes it a little bit richer. It was copyedited a lot with the idea that “this is a controversial thing” and “you’ve got to say where you got all your information.” I wanted to make sure I wasn’t relying on just one family member. Because of the dispute about the police, I had to say exactly where I got my information, which I felt made it more awkward and less conversational. When I read it again the other day, it didn’t sound like the way I normally write. So it leaves me a little cold, but I guess the whole thing leaves me cold because every little piece of it was emotionally draining to do.

Is there anything else you’d like people to know?

I guess just the thing about going back to people. When I first talked to the sister, she wasn’t interested. She said the whole family wasn’t interested. It came like a gift when the dad got in touch. By then the sister was willing to talk. And the soldier who canceled on me – by the time the series ran six months later, he was willing to talk to us again. He’s included in a couple of the other installments.

People change their minds, and it’s worth going back to them gently, respectfully, saying, “How are you doing? Would you be willing to talk to me?” It’s not a comfortable thing, but what you’re doing you hope is for the greater good.

Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

One of the great challenges of narrative journalism is veracity. As you set the scene and build your character, you must remain absolutely faithful to the facts. What do you do if there are things you don’t know? (There will always be things you don’t know.) What do you do if the main character won’t talk to you – or can’t talk to you?

In Beth Macy’s story, Mike Sword couldn’t talk to her because Mike Sword was dead. And how he died, and why, are the crux of her powerful piece – even though the “why” is never entirely answered.

Macy’s piece is admirable for many reasons. It’s seamlessly written, it’s rich in telling and heartbreaking detail, and it’s well-reported. Most important, she tells only what she knows. The question that drives the piece is stated clearly in the second paragraph:

How did it come to pass that the 24-year-old, an expert marksman and former military cop, opened fire on police from Roanoke and Franklin counties in the ­early-morning hours of Feb. 29, 2008, provoking a shootout that ended his life?

It is a question that is never entirely answered, and yet the piece remains satisfying because Macy makes the wise decision to turn unanswered questions into a recurring theme. She poses questions, and she lets us know that the answers are a mystery.

What did Mike think about the roadside bombing that killed his friend? Nobody knows. He never talked about it.

Was he suffering from PTSD? Some think he was; others say he seemed fine.

The summer before his death, was he withdrawn and silent because, as one co-worker thought, he wanted to die? Or was he that way simply because that was his naturally quiet personality?

The night he died, did Mike panic when he saw the cops chasing him? Or was this what he had hoped for? Why was his truck loaded with guns and ammo? What was he doing at the strip club? Was he suffering from a flashback? Or was he suicidal?

Macy writes exactly as much as she knows, and no more:

Grainy video from the only dashboard camera working that night — shot from the cruiser farthest from Mike — offers no clues to his mindset, just the flinching of officers scrambling to duck for cover as Mike, a onetime turret gunner, fires on them.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

Beth Macy’s story on the death of Mike Sword is a great example of using multiple sources (people and records) to write about a person who is no longer around to tell his story. By my count, Macy got at least 14 people to go on the record, including Sword’s father and several relatives, Sword’s Air Force colleagues and Roanoke-area law enforcement officials.

She got these sources to open up – enough to allow her to write a profile full of anecdotes and character details. Her reporting also made it possible for her to include a riveting description of Sword’s last moments.

Here’s what I think Macy got from each group of sources:

Sword’s father, Graham, and other relatives help readers see what Sword was like as a child – adventure-loving, comfortable with camping and hiking in the woods, driven to play war games and paintball. His family also gives us glimpses of Sword later in life – particularly his struggles with Crohn’s disease. And we learn about his lighter side – his love of “Napoleon Dynamite,” Johnny Cash lyrics and prank calls.

Sword’s emails, instant messages and photos help readers get inside Sword’s head and see some of what he experienced in Iraq. As a good narrative reporter, Macy knew that interviewing Graham Sword wouldn’t be enough. She needed to read Mike’s emails and see his photos. Because of that, we get some powerful details, including the image of the aftermath of a roadside bomb that killed one of his fellow airmen. We also learn about how Sword witnessed a young girl getting run over by a military vehicle.

One key family source, Larry Blankenship, a Vietnam veteran, helps us understand that while his nephew didn’t show any trademark signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, he had learned how to hide it. Through Blankenship, we learn that Sword sought counseling at the local Veterans Affairs Medical Center and that he filed a PTSD disability claim.

Sword’s Air Force colleagues portray him as stoic and focused, serious and ambitious. We learn that he was reliable and worked hard, and that he had high ethical standards, once turning in a military contractor who pumped Air Force gas into his personal car. Through his colleagues and relatives, we get a sense that Sword must have felt crushed when the Air Force handed him a medical discharge, in part because of his Crohn’s disease.

Law enforcement officials – including Lt. Chuck Mason, Officer Shaun Chuyka and Deputy Brian Garland – give Macy enough details from their recollections that she deconstructs most of what happened during the high-speed chase and 40-second shootout. She presents what she has found with such fairness and balance that we see the tragedy of Sword’s death from the perspective of both family members and police.

Police reports, court records and police video provide supporting evidence of what happened to Sword. Again, Macy is thinking about how she can document her story beyond interviewing human sources.

One challenge that Macy faced was that Sword’s widow, Kristi, did not give VA counselors permission to talk to the reporter. I presume that Macy was not able to get his medical records, either. She is upfront about this in her storytelling, and while it would have been nice to have that material, I don’t think its absence weakens the story.

To prepare these comments, I compiled a list of Beth’s on-the-record sources and include it here:

• Graham Sword (father)
• Court records (describing Sword’s parents’ divorce)
• Windsor Nevitt (sister)
• Quentin Floyd (shift supervisor at Andrews AFB)
• Sandra Mihovich (Air Force colleague)
• Mike’s email and instant messages (providing details of his tours in Iraq)
• Mike’s photos from Iraq
• Carleena Blankenship (aunt)
• Larry Blankenship (uncle)
• Kristi Sword (Sword’s widow, interviewed by phone)
• VA counselors were not allowed to talk
• Shawn Godfrey (Salem postal supervisor)
• Lt. Chuck Mason (Roanoke County police)
• Officer Shaun Chuyka (Roanoke County police)
• Deputy Brian Garland (Franklin County officer who shot Mike)
• Dashboard camera video
• Police reports
• Tyler Putnam (hospital surgeon)
• Chris Wilson (fellow airman)
• Bill Cleaveland (family attorney)

I’d recommend Beth’s story as a case study for any journalism instructor teaching a class on sourcing.

For more on this story, read our Q-and-A with Beth Macy. For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? Send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

In “Modern-Day Slavery: A Necessary Beat – with Different Challenges,” E. Benjamin Skinner offers a well-written account of reporting on the sex trafficking beat, weighing storytelling with ethics, action, and the needs of his subjects. Melanie Hamman’s “Visual Stories of Human Trafficking’s Victims,” a partner piece to Skinner’s, discusses visual documentary of criminal, exploitative activity, and wounded subjects. “Merely by retelling her story,” Hamman writes, “a victim can be retraumatized, severely complicating her recovery.”

Storyboard contributor (and longtime narrative journalist) Beth Macy offers a sample of the kinds of stories she balances on the family beat at The Roanoke Times and how that beat has changed in her many years there. Looking to the future, Macy says that when it comes to stories, “If we tell them well, it won’t matter what medium we use. They can be our saving grace.”

Very different opinions emerge about new media’s effect on the sports beat, including storytelling in sports. Former Wall Street Journal tech columnist Jason Fry discusses sportswriting as a blogger and ponders what’s most important in reporting. Lindsay Jones, who covers the Broncos for The Denver Post, explains how Twitter works for her. But in excerpts from the 2010 Red Smith Lecture on Journalism at the University of Notre Dame, sportswriter Frank Deford (a senior contributing writer with Sports Illustrated and commentator for NPR) worries about what the digital revolution has done to sportswriting:

“The Internet – or to be kind, the influence of the Internet – is reducing the amount of storytelling in sports journalism … the story – which was always the best of sportswriting, what sports gave so sweetly to us writers – the sports story is the victim. Sportswriting remains so popular – one word. Sports stories – two words, are disappearing.”

Gay Talese might well agree. In an excerpt from an October talk in Boston celebrating the release of “The Silent Season of a Hero: the Sports Writing of Gay Talese,” he answered a question from the audience by saying that reporters are behind their laptops too much. Arguing for being present with subjects and occasionally unplugging, Talese said, “Sometimes I think reporters should waste some time. Good journalism is wasting time.”

The winter issue includes many other stories, from reviews of books about the status of women journalists and the work of legendary writers to a look at whether news organizations have some obligation to tell stories whose audience size may not sustain the resources required to report them. See the full roster here.

When did you decide you needed to turn the story of your grandfather and his twin into a book?

I knew as far back as college — which was back during the Jurassic Age of the late 1980s — that my grandfather had a great story. That was the period where he and my great-uncle were in their Renaissance phase, where they were playing again as older men. I realized, “Hey, what a cool story that these old guys are still doing that after all they went through, that Fthey almost made it as musicians and then fought in the war. What a great story.”

At the time, I wasn’t a writer, and I didn’t really know that that was what I’d be. I was just starting to realize that I liked writing, and I liked literature. At the time, I thought, “Of course you’d have to fictionalize the story, because there’s no way you could go back and research everything they did and went through.” I’ve thought over the years, “God, if I’d only done that, it wouldn’t have taken as long as it did now. But I realized back then that my grandfather had a great story, regardless of who was going to tell it.

You grew up with these stories and at one point started taping your grandfather. But how did you go about thinking about what to include or leave out of the book? Did you have to cut a lot?

Yes, yes. And coming from a newspaper, I already knew a little about front-end editing and self-editing along the way. Even when it came down to doing research, once I got into the nitty-gritty of trying to finalize  things, I could see things where I knew, “OK, this is an interesting piece of information, but it’s not going to make the final cut.”

Even after that, the book as it is now is probably about two-thirds as long as that first draft. I submitted it knowing full well we were going to cut it back. My editor said, “Just get it out, get it on paper, and we’ll go from there.” I did a lot of front-end editing myself, where I said, “OK, this relative here, who was meaningful to the boys’ lives, is not really working out.” Even after that, we still had passages of good stories we cut just because they were a little tangential.

I guess it’s kind of a writing teacher cliché, but I heard somebody say one time that you don’t have a good story when you cut all the bad stuff out of it, you have a great story when you get to the point that you’re cutting good stuff out. I feel like we left some good stuff on the cutting room floor with this.

“If Trouble Don’t Kill Me” is a mix of the 1930s music scene in North Carolina and Virginia and military history from the twins’ experience in World War II. As a writer, how did you frame bringing those two different worlds – music and the war – together?

I knew it was going to be difficult to maintain the same tone and voice through the war part. You start off with this comic “O Brother Where Art Thou?” tale, a little southern Gothic and funny, with guys dressing up as women onstage and doing comic routines. And then all of a sudden it becomes “Saving Private Ryan.” My agent joked that we should call it, “O Band of Brothers, Where Art Thou?” I knew that it was going to get a little darker, but that was important, and it was necessary, because my grandfather’s and my great-uncle’s lives got darker during this period. If you don’t have that, then their story is completely different. It’s just a story of a couple of cute, sweet old boys who almost made it as hillbilly musicians and then as old men decided to go play the VFW circuit.

I knew that were some things in their war experiences that fundamentally changed them and made their story even more gripping later on. I’ve been asked numerous times, “What surprised you in working on this book?” I worked on it so long that I could never remember: “When did I find this out?” I began to worry, “Jeez, did nothing surprise me?”

And then it dawned on me that I don’t think I ever grasped as a younger man what the war had done, especially to my grandfather – that all the health issues he had were either indirectly or directly attributable to what had happened to him in the Philippines and on Okinawa. I guess a lot of us were just discovering what these guys went through on the 50th anniversary of different events, the truth behind these old guys who went and did their duty. They saved the world and built the interstate highway system and never complained. And slowly, I began to realize that, well, it wasn’t that way for a lot of them. I’m sure there were a lot of guys who never lived past the 1960s and ’70s because of things that had happened to them during the war.

Did you think about how to manage the tone so the reader could cross that bridge to the war with you?

I thought a couple things. One, I thought I should keep it focused on the boys as best I could, which was not all that easy, because I don’t have a detailed account of where my grandfather was on each specific day. But if I could do the best that I could and not try to rewrite the history of the European ground offensive in the winter of 1944-45, and instead just keep an eye on Clayton on the bottom of the hill at this one moment, even as the tone got more violent and darker, you could still see it through these two subjects, that they were always there in it.

And the other part of it is, I had to resign myself to the fact that the tone of the book would change, because the tone of their lives changed. They tried to do what they could. My grandfather tried to continue to play in country and western bands before he was shipped out. But their lives were completely changed by this, and there’s no reason to try to write a comic story about what happened to them during the battles of World War II, because not that much that was funny happened to them.  I tried not to worry about how dark it got, because I knew there would be brighter and funnier moments at the end, that the story would resolve and redeem itself.

In places, you bury yourself deep in the story, and in others, you’re very much out in front, sometimes directly addressing the reader and saying “you might think this.” How did you decide when to be in the story?

I think the times where I put myself in there were the times where perhaps a scene had resolved itself or concluded in some way, and then I would come in with a sentence or two or a paragraph or two about what I thought this all meant. I don’t think I put myself in the middle of a battle scene. But there’s a scene where Clayton uses his rifle butt against a Japanese soldier, which is a story I’d heard various versions of through the years. And once that was over, I kind of throw in a little flashback scene of what his life was like before he ever went into the Army and had to shoot another man and was shot himself, to show that he had changed and what that meant for him.

It was much easier in the early parts – the funny part of the book about the music – to drop myself in there, than it was on the island of Okinawa. So I did moderate it a little during the battle scenes.

First-person memoir is really popular these days, but you were doing a family history and cultural history. Did you read stories other people had already done that helped or inspired you along the way?

I don’t know how much of it I really distilled or absorbed, but Rick Bragg certainly did a lot of that with his family. It was a little more first-person memoir, but he also goes back and talks to older relatives.

I think a lot of this just came from my own experience of being a features writer at The Roanoke Times, just interviewing people and trying to tell other peoples’ stories. That’s what I’ve done for 20 years, I guess – I was a sportswriter before, but was doing the same thing.

The newspaper background has really helped me with this. I learned how to try to tell other peoples’ stories and get them or their friends and loved ones to talk about themselves in ways that made it easy to piece together the stories of their lives.

People are like, “So, when’s the next book coming out?” And I’m like, “I don’t really have a next book.” Everybody’s got an idea for a great American novel, but I don’t have any plans to sit down and write it. I felt like this was something I was supposed to do. I felt like these old guys were not going to be able to tell those stories to the world, and none of the family would either. I felt that it fell to me to do it.

Even now, the book’s been out a couple months, but I’m still out there trying to push it, locally and regionally, because I want people not to celebrate me in any way, but to read the stories of these guys, who they probably don’t know and never would have known. I’d like to say my grandfather was a speck in the annals of country music and a speck on the back of an atom on the back of a molecule on the back of a speck of World War II. Their stories could have faded away and nobody would have known or felt like it was a loss, but I felt they had a good story to tell.

It took me a long time to learn how to write and research and report and tell a story. I would have loved to have done this 15 years ago when the guys were still alive, but it wouldn’t have been very good. Their story would have been the same, but my ability to tell it was not then what it is now – whatever it is now. This was the result of writing maybe 5,000 newspaper stories over 20 years and learning how to tell a story clearly, even a complicated story. I always thought about this book by telling myself, “This is just the longest feature story you’ve ever written.” If I approached it that way, I thought I wouldn’t get overwhelmed.

Did that comparison work for you through the whole process, or did it break down at some point?

While I was working on it, I always thought, “This is a result of work, of years and years of work getting me to this point.” I’d like to go before a writer’s workshop and say, “I like to sit under a maple tree in fall and wait for the muse to visit.” But it’s not like that. It’s work, it’s a slog. I can’t build a house, but it’s like building a house on the page. It’s one nail after another. You look at it, and if that row of shingles doesn’t line up, you have to go down and tear some of them up and start over.

If there’s any advice I can give anybody who’s sitting down to write a story like this, whether it’s a long newspaper story, or a book, or a memoir – it’s just work. Do the work. Don’t sit around and wait to be motivated and inspired. Sometimes you’ve just got to suck it up and do it, and if two hours later, you don’t have anything you like, well, the next night, you go back into the salt mine and do it again.

Better than we used to. To hear photographers tell it, in the old days reporters routinely barged up to the photo desk and assigned a photo as if they were ordering a hot dog.

Photographer Josh Meltzer and reporter Beth Macy

I am guilty as charged. In the old days, the stories were ours to dig up and ours to produce. The photography was an afterthought, albeit an important one.

Individualism was in our journalistic DNA, having been schooled to be Lone Rangers out saving the community’s day with our enterprising ways and insights on the world. Witness Russell Crowe in “State of Play”: driving around in his notebook-strewn car, following leads. His boss has no idea what he’s doing, and the young Web-savvy cub reporter they’ve assigned to help him can write a mean personal blog, but she can’t report her way out of a press conference. Watching that movie, I couldn’t help but wonder:

Where’s the photographer? How about the videographer? Where’s the midnight call from the copy desk wanting to know why the spelling on the print version of the story doesn’t match the one in the audio slideshow?

What I’m here to tell the narrative storytellers out there is this: If your story’s going to get the ride it deserves on the Web and in the newspaper, you have got to learn how to share your toys. And(gulp) even your accolades.

As Charlotte, N.C.-based collaboration consultant Kittie Watson puts it: “Newspaper people are so used to working independently, and they’re also used to getting credit as an individual as opposed to a team.”

Watson, who has trained teams to work collaboratively at newspapers and in other industries, says the most common roadblocks to collaboration are distrust and a lack of appreciation for the work styles of others. Mutual disdain is another unspoken biggie I’ve encountered, especially as it relates to the intra-news divide between print and multimedia people.

By nature, most reporters have a pretty high emotional IQ, able to engender trust from their subjects, though not necessarily their other newsroom colleagues. Some new media people relate to computers but not necessarily people or, for that matter, words—they like to call the newspaper “the dead tree version” of the news (aka, that thing that is, albeit tenuously, still paying their salaries).

“No one will read this; it’s too long,” I remember a multimedia editor at my paper saying, as we put the final touches on a three-part series in 2005 that I had spent eight months reporting—and he hadn’t even bothered to read.

I wish I could say I responded maturely.

“[Expletive] you!” I shouted across the design desk. Had I been holding a stapler, say, instead of a set of page proofs, I would have thrown it at him.

Watson calls this the paradox of team life. “You see the value of working as a team; you’re drawing in people with skill sets you don’t have. But once you’re on the team it drives you crazy.” The more the team leader does upfront to establish goals, deadlines and expectations, the more effective the team will be, she adds.

Below are some project collaboration tips I’ve amassed the hard way, after breaking every rule in the book—but not (yet) my stapler.

Team up as early as possible with a photographer you trust and enjoy scheming with. Photographer Josh Meltzer and I had already worked on three narrative projects together before we began casting our respective nets for subjects who would allow us to show the challenges of caring for our community’s elderly. A few months after each of our earlier projects, we started colluding on what our next one was going to be—and figuring out ways to get our respective editors to assign us together to do them. For the 2008 aging series, between other assignments and often on our own time, Josh started hanging out in churches; I made the rounds to adult care centers and support groups. We identified families as potential subjects before we made our project pitch.  (Hint: If you pitch the story jointly, they’re more likely to let you work together on it.) 

Find a partner with a similar work ethic. Bonus points if you both have a shared predilection for dark chocolate, strong coffee, hoppy beer and spouses who don’t freak out that you’re editing video and copy and pictures together in each other’s home offices at all hours of the day and, when it’s crunch time, late at night.

You’re a writer, and you don’t yet have a favorite photog? I suggest glomming onto one. It’s also a good idea to approach collaboration as you would dating: Begin slow, with smaller stories and mini-projects, so you can work out your interpersonal kinks when the stakes aren’t as high. As journalism moves from the print to the Web, mark my words: The smart photographer who can shoot video and do interviews on top of that is going to be the one ordering the hot dogs. 

But realize that one of you will soon step on the other one’s feet. Josh and I have an unspoken rule: No more than one come-to-Jesus moment per project. For our last series, it came when we were both trying to be flies on the wall at a subject’s family gathering. Because Josh was shooting video, I was unable to interact with family members without getting in his video. It didn’t help that it was a one-time event or that the house was small. We made a vow later to communicate better beforehand, to plot out how we could both be flies on the wall—without one of us feeling stuck on a fly strip. We also coordinated most of our remaining visits to the subjects separately—spread out so they wouldn’t get interview fatigue—and we constantly shared what we were seeing along the way. An interview wasn’t over until I got home and typed an e-mail to Josh explaining what I’d learned from it.

A little competition is healthy. I sent Josh transcripts of my interviews and alerted him when I thought a photo- or video-worthy event was happening. He invited me to watch hours of the video he’d been shooting and included me in what he was doing by asking for sequencing feedback and text for his videos. It didn’t occur to me how much reporting help I was getting from him until I left his house armed with an entire notebook full of new details about our subjects—and new questions to ask. I had been feeling a kind of competition with him, I realized, born out of my own insecurity. “Imagine if I showed up and suddenly started taking pictures, and maybe even did it better than you,” I finally said.

It helps to have an organized editor who believes in advance planning for multimedia projects and isn’t afraid to call the shots as the disparate pieces of the puzzle begin to come together. We try to meet monthly at first, more often as the publication date draws near. We’ve learned from previous projects that it pays to have one Web-savvy copy editor edit the text for both print and online for consistency’s sake. Our rule is, copy is due one month minimum before publication, which is good because the interactives, graphics, videos and audio slide shows are due soon after that, and those people on the team who seem to have been ignoring you during your months of reporting now need you constantly: Where is the data for that interactive graphic? Can you write the “uber graf” (intro copy) for the Web site’s main page? Will you find the animator a good pull-quote? The marketing department needs a photo for the in-house ad. And we still haven’t settled on a series name. . . .

Step back, put the stapler down—and cool it on the expletives. If a team member persistently refuses to play nice, Watson suggests addressing it privately but head-on, asking: We haven’t worked well together in the last couple of projects; what can we do differently this time? Conversely, it’s good to begin a project by discussing the best practices of past projects: What worked well the last time we collaborated together? “Some people may have never had to work collaboratively on a large team before,” she says.

It’s good to check in along the way with your colleagues—even if you think things are going well. “If you can work through a conflict with a person, that leads to a closer relationship,” Watson says. “All the literature says that relationships, especially during times of turmoil, are the most important things going for people. It’s ironic that reporters want readers to listen and understand, but sometimes they have a hard time doing that with their own coworkers.”

As newsrooms struggle to reinvent themselves, experts believe collaboration will become more important than ever—not just with coworkers but also with readers (and potential content-sharers) and even competitors such as neighboring newspapers and radio and TV stations. (Examples: The Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg Times recently merged their Tallahassee bureaus to save money; PBS’ Frontline now regularly collaborates with The New York Times and The New Yorker.)

Poynter Institute teacher Bill Mitchell, now a fellow with the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, is researching new business models for journalism and sees creative collaborations emerging at the forefront. “In the big picture of the way journalism will unfold,” Mitchell says, “collaboration will be an adjective attached to whatever happens.”