Cohousing-L Mailing List: Getting Quoted [was: Decent article about New View cohousing in Boston Globe]

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On Jan 7, 2007, at 12:50 PM, Jim Snyder-Grant wrote:

> -And they didn't describe our semi-complex right-of-first refusal 
> correctly,
> but that didn't surprise me. They got it right enough.

After working with a few journalists on articles I've discovered that 
it helps if you can give them in writing only a few, like 3-5 things 
you really care about being said, and said right.

If you hand them the sheaf of papers you have on file, they will pick 
and choose stuff that they think looks interesting and then it will be 
edited from brochure or legal-document-speak to newspaper speak. Then 
it will be edited by someone you never even spoke to.

Since the NY Times is written at 7th grade level, most of our local 
newspapers are probably  written at 4th grade level. Some legal 
documents come out at post-graduate level -- meaning indecipherable by 
most of us. By the time the indecipherable gets edited down by someone 
who has no idea what it was even intended to mean, it can be pretty 
scary.

Some reporters will work by email and I like that a whole lot better.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines, Washington DC
Where all roads lead to Casablanca