Tam Harbert

As a professional journalist, I write about specific topics. Sometimes it’s a topic I’ve chosen and pitched to a publication. Sometimes it’s assigned by an editor. But either way, I have to follow that particular publication’s model, in terms of the angle on the topic as well as the tone and style of the writing. I also have to follow the directions of that particular editor, from which aspects of the story to emphasize to little copy-editing nits like whether to use the serial comma.

But with a blog, there is no editor. One of the joys of blogging is that I can write about anything I want, in any way I want to. No one tells me how to dot my I’s, cross my T’s or place my commas. That’s a great freedom. Freedom to show what a great writer I am. And freedom to display to the world my stupid mistakes.

We writers tend to be egotistical. That means we almost always think we have something worthwhile to say and know the best way to say it. We’re also rather solitary, introspective creatures, so we live in our heads to a large extent. We can easily convince ourselves that our way of looking at something is the only way or the best way, that everyone knows what we know, or for that matter that our readers care about what we care about. When I write about that little white house down the road, for example, it’s easy to forget that most of my readers don’t know I live in the D.C. area and am thus alluding to the residence of the president of the United States.

Of course, blogging is supposed to be a two-way channel, so readers can politely point out my errors, or loudly disagree with my point of view, or heckle me and throw rotten fruit. But at least initially I’d like to walk onto the stage without my slip showing.

I was feeling a little naked out here until a colleague of mine suggested we edit each other’s blogs. It’s a great arrangement. I can still write whatever I want, in any way I want. But my editor points out what works and what doesn’t, at least from his point of view. He helps make my blog better, because he gives me a second perspective that doesn’t come from inside my head (and sometimes even catches my spelling errors). The best part is I can still do things my way, if I insist (no serial commas), but the edit process stops me long enough to check myself in the mirror to make sure I’m not going to make a complete fool of myself.

I wonder how much difference the new healthcare legislation is going to make in a system in which doctors are indifferent to costs and in fact often favor expensive and elaborate treatments over individualized patient care and common sense.

When I see a doctor, I pay attention to prices. My high-deductible insurance plan means I pay for the first $2,600 of my health costs every year. Often, the healthcare system doesn’t like it when I insist on knowing what things cost. This story is an extreme but telling example.

I went to a specialist for treatment of my herniated discs. The specialist was highly rated by a local magazine, so I expected top-notch care. What I found was a practice that seems designed to minimize contact with the patient while maximizing the amount of insurance money it can extract.

When I made the appointment and asked how much it would cost, the response was: “insurance will cover it.” When I explained that I would be paying for it and asked again for the cost, they claimed they couldn’t give me a price because it would be based on the doctor’s diagnosis after our consultation.

My first appointment was hardly a consultation. In fact, the doctor and his staff barely talked to me. I had been asked to fill out a 10-page questionnaire in preparation for our meeting. When I arrived, I reminded them of my concern over cost, and the receptionist assured me that I’d be presented with the price after the doctor had determined my treatment. I waited 45 minutes to see the doctor, who finally breezed in and spent all of 10 minutes with me. He then explained the procedure he recommended, and something about the way he said it made me think it was the exact same recommendation he would give to the 35 other patients he would see that day. Then he handed me a printout of the other things I should buy to treat the problem: a prescription pain patch, a back brace and a home transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) machine to relax back muscles and reduce pain. I wonder how much of a kickback he is getting from the manufacturers.

Again I asked what all this would cost. Again the standard response: “insurance will cover it.” He brushed me off when I tried to explain why that wasn’t an adequate answer.

No one ever gave me a list of the costs. I went ahead and had the procedure, because I was in pain and desperate (I later found out it cost more than $2,000), but didn’t follow the rest of his recommendations right away. I checked with my pharmacist and the pain patches cost $200. Each. When I went back for what turned out to be a five-minute followup, the nurse practitioner chided me for not following the doctor’s orders. And when I tried to explain to her my concern about cost? You guessed it: “insurance will cover it.” When it was clear I wasn’t buying, she yanked the info sheet on the TENS machine out of my hands and told me I could wait on that, but insisted I get the back brace. It came in the mail the other day. It looks expensive, but I won’t know how much it is costing me until the doctor bills my insurance company, and the insurance company in turn bills me.

My primary care doctor doesn’t even take insurance. I find that liberates both of us to cut through the insurance bullshit. He’s straightforward about costs. His rate is $90 per half hour. Period. He’s not trying to push more tests, procedures or pills on me. In fact, when I needed an MRI for my back, he gave me two different labs to call. He advised me to call both, explain that I was a “self pay,” and then dicker with them on the price. The first lab wouldn’t come down on the $1,100 sticker price. The second one dropped the price to $500.

Why is there such a lack of transparency, not to mention logic, in healthcare prices? Somebody in this system is making a lot of money from the fact that “insurance will cover it,” and those people have an obvious interest in obscuring costs. Until more patients have to pay more directly for their healthcare, which will in turn force all the players to be more accountable, I doubt that the system will change.

Story structure is one of the most difficult aspects of journalistic writing. It’s also the most important. After all, structure is what makes a story, a story. Sometimes when a story’s hard to edit and I can’t figure out why, it eventually dawns on me that it has a bad structure, or no structure at all. The writer may have good information, great sources, proper spelling and grammar, and solid writing, but without a good structure the reader (and the editor) finds the story unsatisfying. It’s like the writer is handing you a box full of puzzle pieces, rather than fitting them together to show you the picture.

I’ve found that the most time-consuming and painful way to write a story is to dive in without a structure in mind. I may ultimately decide it’s not the right structure, but I have to start with some kind of structure. If I just start lifting from my notes, trying to string facts and quotes together in a serial process, there is no engine to drive the story and no digestion of the material to deliver analysis or fresh insight to the reader. As James W. Michaels, former editor of Forbes magazine, once said in critiquing a writer’s story: “This is not reporting, it’s stenography!”

Sometimes the structure is obvious. A story that documents someone’s life or a particular incident, for example, usually uses time as its structure. It starts at the beginning and ends at the end. Even then, however, it can be more interesting to tell the story out of sequence. Maybe starting at the end and interspersing flashbacks would be more compelling, for instance.

But many stories don’t have a beginning or end. I may write about a federal policy or regulatory issue and its impact on the technology industry. Or perhaps I’m covering a hot technology and trying to assess how it will develop, what products are likely and what companies might dominate the emerging market. In a policy story, I can present the arguments for and against. But that’s predictable, boring and delivers little value to the reader. For a technology or market, I can explain the factors behind it, say where it is now and report predictions from various industry luminaries. Ditto.

What helps me find a structure – especially with particularly complex stories with lots of sources – is deciding which story I want to tell. After all, from any given set of facts and interviews, many different stories could be told. So after I’ve finished all my reporting, I let it percolate in the back of my mind while I go do something else. When I’m ready to write, but before I review my notes, I start playing with a story map. I randomly jot down the ideas and facts that I remember most clearly from my research and reporting. Sometimes certain quotes still ring in my ears. Then I try to group the facts and quotes that relate to particular ideas. These are my main building blocks. But they still aren’t connected. However, after distilling the information a picture often starts to emerge. I reach a conclusion – based on who my reader is, the type of publication I’m writing for and my own judgment – about what is the most valuable story to tell.

Once I know what I’m trying to give to the reader, I can figure out the best way to do it. Hopefully the result is a puzzle solved – a deeper understanding of an issue or event – rather than just a jumble of facts and commentary.

A few weeks ago, I read “Connecting America: The National Broadband Plan,” a 376-page report by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, for a story I wrote for Electronic News. OK, I didn’t read every single page, but I skimmed through most of it, and actually read entire chapters.

One chapter in particular hit me where I, and in fact anyone who works from home, live. In Chapter 3, which describes the state of broadband in the United States, the FCC points out that consumers are not exactly getting the broadband speeds that are advertised. In fact, the actual broadband speed in American households is on average only 40 to 50 percent of the speed advertised by the provider, according to the FCC.

I’ve often wished there were a way to verify the speed claimed by my broadband provider, Comcast. Over the years Comcast has purportedly upgraded my speed several times. I’ve never noticed a difference. Last year, when I called to complain about its prices, the customer service rep lowered my monthly subscription fee by 50 percent. (This had more to do with Verizon’s high-speed fiber service, FIOS, moving into my neighborhood than my complaining, I’m sure.) He also threw in a free PowerBoost, a speed upgrade which is supposed to deliver download speeds of up to 15 megabits per second (Mbps) and upload speeds of up to 3 Mbps. Notice that very useful marketing phrase: “up to.” As the FCC report puts it: “An end-user with a connection for which download speeds are ‘up to 8 Mbps’ can expect to reach 8-Mbps download speeds, but not necessarily reach and sustain that speed all or even most of the time.” Again, I never noticed a difference.

Meanwhile, the FCC recently launched a nifty Consumer Broadband Test on its website. The test, still in beta, actually offers two different testing tools: one from Ookla and one from M-Lab. Simply enter your address and click a button, which starts a transfer of small amounts of generic data between your computer and the nearest test server. In about a minute, it gives you download and upload speeds, as well as a few other statistics.

I ran both tests several times, expecting to find how much slower my speeds were than what Comcast claimed. The results were different each time, sometimes wildly so, both between the two tests and for the same test in different instances. But in general they all fell within a certain range. And those general results surprised me. If I’m correct in my math (the tests deliver speeds in kilobits per second, which I had to convert to megabits), the tests showed download speeds of around 24 Mbps and upload speeds of about 4 Mbps – much faster than the advertised speeds. If this holds true for most Comcast customers, the company is missing a golden marketing opportunity. It’s rare that this broadband provider has delivered more than it promised, at least to me.

Then again, the FCC cautions that the current beta version of the tests may not be very accurate. Presumably, the FCC will improve future versions so I can trust it at least more than I trust Comcast. The FCC report notes that broadband companies have misled consumers about more than just speeds; they’ve also been accused of not actually delivering services in certain parts of their advertised service areas. The Consumer Broadband Test will give consumers and the government (which plans to gather and aggregate the data from the test) a way to keep them honest.