Whitewater on Milan Dam Story

The following was submitted by The View staff reporter Jerry LaVaute:

I was reminded this last weekend about the ongoing importance of stepping back from an almost-completed story, and doing my best to look at it through the eyes of someone less familiar with the story, say an editor or a reader.

The example was a story I did on how the Milan city council recently approved over $800,000 to repair and replace the dam retaining wall that runs next to city hall, east of the dam itself on Ford Lake.

My editor used just the word “dam” in the headline for the online story, and I received two e-mails from city officials concerned that readers of the Milan News-Leader might think that the dam itself was being replaced.

I received these e-mails a few minutes before I planned to leave the house with my wife. I hurriedly changed a couple things about the story, and sent the updated story to my editor with a request to use the phrase “dam retaining wall” instead of the word “dam” in the headline.

The next day, I sent a note to the two officials to explain what I’d done, and they were satisfied, and thanked me. One of them said that it was otherwise a good story.

Describing technical subjects requires added attention. The reporter’s job is to take what may be a complex story, or a story that may be described in an unnecessarily complicated way, and make sense of it to readers.

I take pride in my ability to do that, and count on 31 years of making sense of Ford engineering design proposals to the layman, in this case Ford’s senior management, to quickly convey what’s going on physically, the better to get to the cost discussion quickly and efficiently.

I still take pride in that today, but I was reminded recently that it requires ongoing vigilance.