Watch my media training in action on Fox Philly! I was not expecting to hear the question about college kids starting businesses. But I was prepared to talk about major brands that are named after real people. So I doggedly went after that angle instead.
“Did you know Chef Boyardee was a real guy?” I asked instead of actually answering her question. Now that I know that’s such a smooth diversionary tactic, I’m going to use it all the time.
“License and registration please.” Beat. “Officer, did you know Chef Boyardee was a real guy?”
I evaded like a politician, and no one even noticed.
My slick response was based on the best media training advice I ever got: “Don’t answer the question that was asked. Answer the question you wish had been asked. No one will notice.”
Now that you know that trick, you’ll start noticing that every Senator under the sun uses it daily.
I am showing this to you first because you love me more.
It’s me at It’s a Wrap in the Valley, where costumes from Hollywood TV and movie wardrobe departments are sold as vintage for cheap. Battlestar Galactica was on the list of shows that had clothes represented in the inventory, but try as I did, I couldn’t find anything from the show.
…Since Sir Rocco Forte and Olga Polizzi refurbished the hotel in 2008, we have dedicated one of our private dining rooms to Alexander Graham Bell and it now includes illustrations of telephones from over the years, a plaque, a photo of him in his study and even an antique telephone…
Hooray! Well done. That’s a lot better than the decorative equivalent of a dial tone that was previously accorded to the communications pioneer.
The rep also apologized for my “visit” by that attentive spirit, which amused me to read. Apologized! Isn’t that just the essence of British hospitality? It’s like they’re saying, So sorry you were visited by a ghost. We so hope to welcome you back again soon.
Did I mention that I love Brown’s?
For the record, I would stay again because of the ghost.
Brown’s Hotel is one of London’s most grande dames. It’s been open since 1837, gradually expanding into 11 townhouses as it collected esteem and high custom, and there’s no way to underestimate the important role it has played through the ages.
For one, it’s where the first successful telephone call in the United Kingdom was demonstrated by Alexander Graham Bell. When I stayed at Brown’s, I asked to see the room where it happened, and I had to be passed from staffer to staffer before someone could bring me to it. When it got there, I found not a plaque or even an antique phone, but a mundane meeting room. That’s how many important things have happened at Brown’s: The cradle of modern communication itself doesn’t rank as worthy of marking.
The Kipling Suite (and straw hat lamp), Brown's Hotel, London
Mark Twain stayed here. In one of his most famous episodes, in 1907, he scandalized the British press (and made the New York Times) by appearing in the lobby in his blue bathrobe and pajamas (‘scuse me — pyjamas) and taking questions with three inches of bare leg in plain view. “Mark Twain exhibited himself as an eccentric to-day,” tittered the Times on its front page, “and every staid Londoner who witnessed the exhibition fairly gasped.”
Stephen King, sleepless during a stay there, began writing Misery on a typewriter that was then in a stairwell. Lord Kelvin reached the decision to harness the power of the Niagara there. Kings and Queens of various countries have lived here while in exile from their own war-torn lands. And Rudyard Kipling spent many of his final days living at Brown’s. He finished writing The Jungle Book in a suite there. In 1936, he was found slumped over his desk there, stricken by a perforated ulcer that soon killed him.
That is now The Kipling Suite, and a few years ago I was lucky enough to stay there. I furnish now for you some delicious hotel porn. I only regret that I failed to capture any images of the bathroom, which has a huge flat-screen TV with speakers over the tub. Not taking a bath in the Kipling Suite is like pushing your plate of Thanksgiving dinner away after having a single forkful of beans.
In keeping with its past literary guests, the rooms at Brown’s are stocked with classic titles as well as art. Considering rooms can cost £450 a night, I wonder if they charge you for “accidentally” slipping a copy of The Jungle Book into your luggage on the way out.
The Kipling Suite, Brown's Hotel, London
Having a room of this size and sweep is physically exhausting, because there’s not enough me to go around. I want to enjoy the tub, the chaise, the windows. I want to sit momentarily at every desk, admire every objet d’art, soak up every thread of gratitude for being there. The irony is while you’re concentrating on cherishing something, you find it pretty much impossible to truly enjoy in it. How can you sit in a room with that marvelous wooden lamp, the one shaped like an Edwardian straw hat, and not let your thoughts wander, reminding yourself not to daydream and miss anything?
Luxury is most deeply enjoyed when you learn to take it for granted, and by that time, it won’t do you any good anyway.
An incredible thing happened to me in this room, and it occurred during one of the few moments when I had no choice but to let my mind wander. I was asleep. It was about 6 a.m., and I stirred awake with the feeling that someone was standing at the foot of the bed. It wasn’t scared. It wasn’t a scary feeling. I simply tried forcing my eyes open as a figure materialized.
It was a middle-aged woman in a modest black-and-white French maid’s outfit. She was a chambermaid, slightly pudgy and benign. She had a white towel folded over her left arm, and she leaned slightly over my feet as if she was in the act of placing it or taking it up. She was attending to me as I slept. She didn’t say a thing. I forced my eyes open all the way, and that’s when she melted away.
The bed where It happened, Kipling Suite, Brown's Hotel, London
Like I said, I wasn’t frightened. In fact, it seemed (in that hazy nighttime logic that seems bizarre but in fact is probably the clearest of the day) as if she was in the proper place and it was me who was in the wrong place. Feeling oddly comforted, I went back to sleep.
Hours later, I was leaving the Kipling Suite for a day of research. As I walked down the hall, I passed a maid — a real one this time — in a French chambermaid’s outfit. Her clothes were identical to my visitor’s except hers were grey and white. She had a white towel over her left arm. She wished me good morning.
When I told the desk staff at Brown’s that I had seen a ghost, they didn’t seem amused. In fact, they didn’t press me for a single detail. I must have seemed like a nut, or else they’ve heard similar stories before. I tried warming them up by reassuring them that this spectral staff member was spotted in the act of delivering superlative attention. But they were immoveable. At Brown’s, we mustn’t gossip too loudly about the past.
Brown’s Hotel is on Albemarle Street in Mayfair, London
Last fall, as Aol prepared to launch a new system for collecting stories from freelancers (Seed), I was asked by the site’s creators to make a boilerplate instructional post that would help new writers learn the ropes. I was given only a topic: “How to Conduct a Successful Interview.”
I wrote it quickly and sent it along, and someone else edited it and gussied it up with links to a few interviews I had done — as evidence of good form, apparently. That article, it turns out, has become one of the most popular in Seed Academy, the collection of instructional posts for fledgling journalists.
When I learned that, I was curious to re-read what I had said. You’re probably curious, too.
Shocking, really. Did I really write that joke about murder? And did I use that hokey old Boy Scouts cliché? Well, no. No, I didn’t. Although I can’t argue with the content, the delivery gives me the vapors. If that post were Project Runway and Michael Kors was an editor, he’d instantly question my taste level and I’d be auf’ed. I’d auf me, for sure.
I’ve compared the published version to the one I actually wrote. The italicized sentences were grafted on later. It’s typical of publishing, by the way.
*Remember this the next time you get mad at a writer for putting something in an article or a headline: The person who you think wrote it might not have.
+++++ Jason Cochran is Editor-at-Large for WalletPop.com
Interview skills are important for any writer. No matter how well-informed you are, there will almost always come a time when you have to ask someone their opinion on a topic — and you want to do it correctly. An interview is also a good way to round out an otherwise dry analysis with a “human touch.” Interviewing an individual, and letting them express their thoughts, helps drive your point home — by demonstrating that there are real people out there suffering, enjoying, sharing, laughing, loving, crying, or whatever — just like you mentioned in your story.
Put simply, your job as an interviewer is to simultaneously stimulate the subject into saying things and to listen.
Ask the Right Questions To get someone talking, think like a Boy Scout and be prepared. Do your research, then prepare a rough list of questions you think might produce the answers you need for your article. Then, when your subject starts talking, keep engaging them until they answer the question. That may require that you to re-ask the same question in different words. Not all interview subjects are stubborn, but many of them get nervous — especially if they aren’t interviewed often — and clarity from you is important to guide them to answer what you have asked. Sometimes, it also helps to repeat their answer back, but in your own words, to make sure you understand what they’ve said.
Example: Joystiq’s interview with Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor
Listen and Learn
Truly listening is the harder part. As the interviewer, your mind is likely to be racing while you make sure you get all the answers you need in the time allotted to you. It’s tempting to interrupt the subject to speed things along, but if you can help it, don’t. Subjects sometimes keep talking to fill silence, and it’s in those moments that often the most interesting revelations are made.
Although you need to know what you’d like to get out of the interview, if you’re truly listening, you will be able to pick up on interesting things the subject says and ask immediate follow-up questions about them. You may find that the order of your questions gets shuffled on the fly depending on how your subject answers. You may also find that your story isn’t actually what you thought it was going to be.
It’s a Conversation, not a Cross-Exam
The best interviews are not cross-examinations, but conversations. You may get the best results if you front-load your interview with easier questions, and then ask the tougher or more sensitive questions toward the end of the chat, when the subject has grown used to you.
If your state laws permit it (check The Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press’ state listing to find out), it’s wise to record the conversation so that you can properly transcribe it. Most models of digital recorders can both be hooked to phones and or brought for in-person interviews. Always notify the subject beforehand if you’re recording the chat. You might want to say it’s so that “I get your answers exactly right,” since that puts many subjects at ease, but in fact it’s as much for your own protection since it will quickly settle any specious claims that you have taken anything “out of context.” It’s not wise to simply type their answers as you go or to transcribe from memory, because this often leads to unintentional paraphrasing.
Other tips for successful interviews include:
• Take back-up notes, in the off chance your recording device flakes out just as the subject is about to confess to the mur-.
• Transcribe your interview as soon as possible after the actual interview for a more robust piece. Even though you have the recording to listen to endlessly, it’s tough to capture the “spirit” of an interview days after it ended.
• A face-to-face interview will almost always offer the best results. Nothing beats face-to-face social interaction for eliciting details. A phone call probably falls next on the order preference list, followed by email; going through a spokesperson; and lastly, using press release quotes. How ever you source your quotes, you should mention that in the story.
++++
Journalists are expected to be rigorous when quoting sources. No editor, though, feels compelled to source his or her changes when they’re imposed upon a writer.
I was on TV. Ever had a conversation with someone you can’t see and who isn’t there? What sounds an awful lot like insanity is, in fact, the way a modern satellite interview works.
I’m in New York City’s Fox News studio, talking to a camera about debt settlement rip-offs and Groupon while newsroom employees sit next to me, blocking out my voice with headphones. At that very moment, Glenn Beck was just feet away, scribbling furiously on blackboards. How’s your news?
She makes everyone around her better. She has the kind of energy that can leave you in the dust. I like to say that having a conversation with Barbara is like listening to five radio stations at the same time.
Jason Cochran is an award-winning travel journalist, pop historian, and consumer reporter. He was the first person in a quarter century to win Guidebook of the Year twice in the Lowell Thomas Awards by the Society of American Travel Writers. The Editor-in-Chief of Frommers.com, he has written extensively for the New York Post, Budget Travel (as senior editor); Entertainment Weekly; the New York Times and New York Daily News; USA Today; Travel + Leisure and T+L Family; Travel + Leisure.com; BBC Travel; Concierge.com; Newsweek; City; Frommers.com; the South Florida Sun-Sentinel; Arena (U.K.); Who (Australia); Scanorama and Seasons (Sweden). He was Executive Editor at AOL Travel and filed popular AOL video segments as Editor-at-Large for WalletPop.com. He was a featured columnist for Kurt Andersen’s pioneer Web magazine Inside.com and Microsoft’s milestone Sidewalk.com and he devised questions for the first American prime-time season of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (ABC). He originated, produced, and hosted AfterShark, the post-show for Mark Burnett’s Shark Tank (ABC) and has been seen as a regular contributor in consumer and travel issues to CBS This Morning and The Early Show and on his weekly consumer reporting segment on Fox Philly. As a commentator, he has been on outlets including BBC World, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News, the CBC, Good Morning America, CNNfn, Australia.com, WOR, Outdoor Life Network, MSNBC.com, and national radio shows including those of Arthur Frommer and Doug Stephan.
He writes the Frommer’s guides to London and Orlando. He was also awarded Guide Book of the Year by the North American Travel Journalists Association for his book on London, and his other guides include San Francisco. His writing has been awarded the Golden Pen by the Croatian government and was selected to appear in a permanent exhibit in the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. He is an alumnus of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and New York University’s Graduate Music Theatre Writing Program.
Jason Cochran
A few posts appeared in earlier forms on other websites but have been revised.
A few years ago, I was doing something mundane when the feeling hit me. I want to go to Harpers Ferry, I thought.
Can’t explain why. I went through a John Brown period about 15 years ago (doesn’t every American history buff go through a John Brown period?), when my collaborator and I were trying to figure out a way to turn his life into a music theatre piece. He was a strange, fiery, erratic, Mad Hatter of a man, a tyrant, yet although his methods were lunatic, his goals were so admirable. He must have thought he was a failure when he died, yet he was bent on giving his death for his cause anyway.
Not many of us would fly headlong into something knowing we could very well fail. Maybe that made the violence easier.
Anyway, we eventually decided that it couldn’t be a music theatre piece. It had to be an opera, and neither one of us wanted to write an opera, so we turned to a Milton Berle theme instead.
High Street from Shenandoah Street, Harpers Ferry
Harpers Ferry (no apostrophe, mind) is not conveniently located. It’s in a little edge of West Virginia, near Maryland, and about 90 minutes from Washington. The only way you end up in Harpers Ferry is if you mean to go.
Yet in the post-colonial period, it seemed to be the center of the American universe. George Washington did some work there and picked it as a nice site for a munitions fort. Meriwether Lewis passed through on his way out west, picking up munitions of his own. Then John Brown picked it as the location of his disastrous raid. After they hanged him in a nearby town, the Civil War kicked up and its bloodiest battle, Antietam, was fought practically around the corner.
That’s some pretty heavy historical action for 100 years. But once the Civil War ended, fate pulled up stakes and left Harpers Ferry. Carved into the landscape by war, made essential by canals and rail, it became obsolete as the storms of the industrial revolution passed us by.
As if that story isn’t American enough, now there’s a fudge shop, some custard stands, jewelry and candle boutiques, a deliciously sad wax museum, and a bunch of similarly sad National Parks exhibitions that are mostly written as general overviews of basic historical concepts, as if they’re meant for third-grade field trips.
Finally in Harpers Ferry
Maybe there’s some genetic memory in me that made me want to go. Perhaps that was the call. But I wanted to go to this little spit of land between two rivers. So two weeks ago, on a work visit to Washington DC, I took a Friday afternoon and I finally got myself to Harpers Ferry.
John Brown's shed, Harpers Ferry
There are a few ghosts left there, though. The buildings are wooden, so they smell of mildew and age. Two rivers converge alongside it, pocked with the stumps of forgotten bridges. The ceilings stoop a little too low for modern heads.
The stone building where Brown held his last stand — and some of his cohorts were ruthlessly bayonetted against brick walls when their siege collapsed — is still there, but not in its original location. His little cabin became a portable shrine. It went to Chicago for the Exposition in 1893, then to the yard of a nearby college for another few generations, before meandering back to Harpers Ferry in the 1960s, where it has sat, in the wrong place, ever since.
The accompanying sign acknowledges in passing that 19th-century pilgrims picked the little barn clean of relics, and although it doesn’t hint at how extreme the damage was, it was probably pretty severe, because today the it looks as neat as if Walt Disney himself built it for our attentions. It’s so fresh and clean, they could sell apples out of it.
I’m usually a stickler for authenticity, and that includes location. The Europeans can manage to keep things as they are for centuries, but Americans can’t seem to stop fiddling with their shrines.
But for all the changes, the town feels more or less like it probably did for most of its vital life, minus lots of fences and soldiers. And for all my inexplicable yearning to go, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been there before.
Train into Harpers Ferry, West Virginia
No ghosts spoke to me in Harpers Ferry, but then again, I would need to sit a while to hear them. Perhaps they didn’t say anything because, like them, I expect somehow to return. If history has shown anything, it’s that once Harpers Ferry enters a story, it’s bound to keep coming back in new forms.
Harpers Ferry encapsulates all the major eras of American history: colonial, canal, rail, industrial, emancipation, rust, and finally, atrophy by ice cream.
I’d like to stay at night sometime and see what it feels like. By day, hikers cross through every so often as they make their way on the Appalachian Trail, which cuts through town and supports a few outfitters, just as it did in Lewis’ day. By day, there’s not much to do except buy custard from sullen West Virginian teen-agers and, of course, go to the sublime John Brown Wax Museum.
It’s the tackiest tourist attraction in town, so of course I went.
“How old are these figures?” I asked the bored-looking girl at the front desk.
“Um…” she said, and thought about it for a while. “They’ve been here longer than I have. And I’m 30!”
Each tableau, almost certainly unintentionally, seems drawn from classical paintings of historic events, the kind painted generations later by artists who’d never been there and wanted to cop a little noble grandeur.
The heroes of the story usually have blank expressions, which lends them the beatific air of Renaissance figures, but their poses are usually no less than heroic, which allows the otherwise even-handed curators to faintly suggest where they really stand on the issue of slavery. After all, although John Brown is an abolitionist hero, West Virginia still qualifies as the South, so stylistically, a little hedging is in order.
As if they’re intent on cramming every name from every textbook describing the whole affair, every lieutenant and sheriff no matter how minor, the creators of the John Brown Wax Museum have stuffed eight, ten, sometimes 14 figures into each scene. So as you make your way through the creaky old wooden house that houses the scenes, it’s like you keep stumbling into walk-in closets that have been packed with historical import. As if you went into the crawl space looking for the vacuum and found John Brown and his men in there, dispassionately hacking a a machete toward a luckless Kansan who only has a rake for self-defense.
John Brown's raiders in the Kansas Raid, John Brown Wax Museum, Harpers Ferry
In each diorama, the participants have been thoughtfully labelled with little name cards, so that Brown’s clandestine meetings at the Kennedy Farm House now come off like a frontier version of the United Nations. Women, of course, are not labelled, which Brown probably would have approved of. He was an Old Testament guy.
Naturally, the Wax Museum is obsessed with suffering and death, which makes sense: The bloody raid is the reason most people remember Harpers Ferry at all, and the macabre is a major reason you go to attractions like these. The first scene was of a slave family being torn apart during a sale, and it only gets more harrowing from there.
As I neared the climax of the John Brown wax tale, I kept hearing a strange mechanical sound, like the grinding of a windshield wiper that needed replacing or a DVD player having a hard time spitting out a disc. Nearing the source of the sound, I found my favorite tableau.
It was the one depicting the start of the Harpers Ferry raid on October 16, 1859. In it, Brown is shown on his knees (penitently, to go with that Renaissance theme) at the Harpers Ferry train station. He’s mourning over the body of Shephard Hayward, whom a sign pointedly describes as “a free Negro” who was “ironically, the first person to be killed by the raiding party.” Hayward’s mannequin, as red-shirted as a Star Trek casualty, repeatedly heaves his last breath with the aid of a noisy motor that laboriously cranks his chest up and down.
The eternal mechanical death of Shephard Hayward
The wax version of John Brown is tormented by the fact he’s caused the death of one of the race of people he meant to incite. True enough, the first victim of the raid here was a black guy. Considering the whole point of the raid was to encourage nearby slaves to revolt and come get the guns that Brown was trying to liberate from the arsenal here, it was a pretty muddled beginning, symbolically speaking. It’s as confused as his own worldview, but just as stark.
The last time we see John Brown, we’re looking down at him as he ascends the stairs of the gallows, head bowed in observance of his coming solemn sacrifice. When you press a green button beside the case, you get some important narration laid over the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
“You have just seen a series of exhibits depicting highlights from the controversial life of John Brown,” the narrator intones. “The true character of John Brown is as much of an enigma today as it was when he attacked Harpers Ferry with a handful of men. And as it was at the moment he set foot on the gallows at Charles Town and waited with majestic serenity for the drop into eternity.”
Forget John Brown. I could die!
Then, while you’re watching the trap door to see it swing open, it’s John Brown himself who stirs, right when the narrator says he “wanted to lift the sin of slavery from the conscience of America.” Brown looks heavenward, directly at you. He’s trying to tell you something important! If only he could speak to you through the ages! If only he could shout through the clear plastic window that encases him!
“His soul goes marching on,” the narrator informs us. And it’s over.
