•July 12, 2023•
By Jim Baumann
NP Guest Writer

With apologies to any of you our reporters have interviewed, not everything you say is interesting.
Not everything I say is interesting either, but that’s the joy of writing a first-person column and being the editor of the paper.
Nanny nanny foo foo.
We will interview someone at length for a profile story and, from that, use a smattering of quotes and weave in details from other things the subject has told us as “color.”
Too often, though, reporters — reporters from a great many newspapers I’ve read — lean too hard on quotes to tell the story, especially when it’s a story that talks about process rather than emotion.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about how jargon slows down our writing. Last week it was how unnecessary words do the same.
Today, it’s all about how quotes in news writing should act as punctuation.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.