Keeping Track
So much of what we are doing with our workings is keeping track.
I was reading the always-interesting Storyboard, and caught this snippet which directly looks into how journalists — or at least one journalist — keep track of their sources:
From 'Journalism is the privilege to learn as you go' by Mark Armstrong:
Reeves Wiedeman wrote a terrific New York magazine profile of "Saturday Night Live" creator Lorne Michaels. It's all the more impressive given that a) Michaels didn't participate, b) some in his orbit were skittish about saying anything on the record, partially because they wanted to make sure they were invited to the show's 50th anniversary party, and c) there are already countless books and stories about Michaels and "SNL" — including a new biography by Susan Morrison.
For our purposes here on Storyboard, Choire Sicha asked Wiedeman the most important question of all: How did he keep track of all his sources?
Thank you for asking this question. I have a spreadsheet. It has many tabs. The tabs sort of morph and grow and then condense. I keep track in there of when I've reached out to people, how I've reached out to people, whether they've responded, little notes for things I want to talk to them about, priority for who I want to talk to first. On a story like this, there's been a couple hundred writers, almost 200 cast members, at least that many people who've worked there. Every story I start working on, I fire up a spreadsheet and just start filling in names. Maybe my excitement here is a little sad?
[Storyboard editor's note: Not sad at all!]
I went and found the next few paragraphs. Back to Armstrong quoting Sicha:
No, it's crucial because literally you realize you're in chaos. People used to use index cards for things like this, which is insane. What are your spreadsheet tabs called?
Well, here I had a list of people who the only way I could figure out how to reach them was if I got a Twitter premium account. So I had filed them away together. Then there’s a group of people who are currently on the SNL staff. I made a list of all the musicians who were in the band at one point.
That’s sick.
Sick is, yes, definitely the right word.
Would probably be easier in Obsidian than in spreadsheet tabs, but we have to use the tools we know how to use.
I’d create a note for each person, add attributes to capture information like ‘current SNL staff’, ‘band member 2006-2008', or ‘Twitter premium’, and I’d make various projects’ views to filter the different sets of people.
Spreadsheets are best for calculations, and less good for the kind of workings that Wiedeman was up to.