Where I Got My Latest Round of Stories

The single most frequent question I get is “How do you get your stories?” My answer: Beyond the obvious means (developing beats and subscribing to wires), it’s simply a natural reflex developed over time of being more observant and conscious of what could be news when you come across an idea. That’s not to say that when you start thinking like a journalist, all of a sudden a meteor will land on your front lawn, BUT a journalist’s first thought when a meteor lands on their front lawn will be “How can I best turn this into a story?”

Recent story pitches of mine since returning from New Orleans in early November:

1. Coast Guard Vet Seeks to Write Screenplay to Highlight Branch of Military Service-

How I got the story: I participate in a discussion group once a month. In November, the theme was veterans on film and a couple veterans were invited to participate. One man was a Coast Guard veteran who had previously entered the Mike Nichols screenplay competition and wanted to write a film about the Coast Guard because so few military films have focused on that branch of service and so few people know what the Coast Guard does. Why I pursued it:  I felt this was a valid point and that this person’s quest could be accompanied by a historical context were certain branches of military actively cultivated their image through Hollywood. Plus, this should be good fodder to both film and military movies.

Where the Pitch Stands: I have not yet pitched it. It seems evergreen enough that it can wait. I did contact the subject and he readily gave me a really long biography

2. Afghan Translator Gains Refugee Status With Help of Virginia-Based Author; Arrives to McLean: How I got the story: I do work at the Archives in College Park Maryland and one day a man offered to give me a ride back when we both got out late and I missed the shuttle. On the way, he told me he had to stop and pick up a friend in Alexandria who got stopped by the police for attempting to bike on a highway. It turned out this man was an Afghan refugee who had been in the country just a couple weeks (not counting his initial point of entry at an army base) and was trying to file for his social security card. What’s more the man giving me a ride was an author who had used the translator when in Afghanistan and agreed to be his sponsor.

Why I pursued it: I thought it was an incredible and moving story. I also have been learning more about the region and the situation every second I talk to these two.

Where the Pitch Stands: Greenlit for a handsome price and I am working on it now. It will appear in Northern Virginia Magazine in February I believe.

3. Counselor to the Stars:

How I Found It: Like the situation above, this story came about when I was getting a ride from a couple. Getting out is good and in two cases, it’s been a blessing in disguise not to have a car. The wife in this couple is a counselor to a distance learning school that has been doing this style since before the pandemic. She has been a guidance counselor to Broadway stars, tennis prodigies, and Olympic hopefuls.

Why I pursued it: I write for an outlet that would be a good fit for it and I think it’s a really interesting take.

Where the Pitch Stands: At first, I had the problem of losing the subject’s contact information but I eventually tracked that down. She’s cleared it with her school. Now the problem is that an editor seemed on board with this one but I haven’t heard from him lately. Wish me luck in getting back in touch with him.

4. Virginian actress Tori Pence is Mormon famous:

How I got the story: I am a fan of a TV show called Studio C which is a family-friendly sketch comedy show run by a network that’s affiliated with BYU. The show caters primarily to Mormons and Utahans but because it’s on YouTube, it occasionally gets fans from outside those communities. One of the actors (one of the more talented ones in my opinion) said in an instagram chat that she was from Virginia which prompted me to pitch a place-based story to some Virginia contacts. Why I pursued it: I think it’s fascinating to write about a group of sketch actors with a very specific niche who are famous in certain communities but might not be known by the rest of the country (yet). I also am a fan of this particular actress.   Where the Pitch Stands: I’ve pitched this to one newspaper I haven’t heard from and I’m easing into this one slowly. The network’s  PR person said he’d contact Tori on my behalf so we’re still waiting on this

5. Abundance of Jewish A Capella Groups at the University of Maryland

How I got the story: Looking for Channukah options, I went to my synagogue’s annual holiday party and the entertainment was an a capella group from UMD. At the end of the concert, I talked to them and they said they were one of three Jewish a capella groups.

Why I pursued it: I just think three groups on one campus is interesting and it felt like it was worth a shot to pitch it. I also enjoy a capella music and have written about it before

Where the pitch stands: I have a feeling there’s only one publication that this would be a good fit for and I pitched it there. So far the editor hasn’t committed yet but I’m not getting my hopes up.

6.  Local Piano YouTube Star

How I Found It: Basically, there was a jazz song I wanted to see covered on piano. In my search, I fell in love with the style of a certain player with a large YouTube following. I felt like I hit the lottery when I saw in the video description that she requests fan mail be sent to her apartment in Alexandria, VA. Why I pursued it: I love the piano and think the sudden fame and the different metrics by which you measure life success as a YouTube star must be doubly interesting as a classically trained pianist. Where the pitch stands: I got it green lit but sadly have not back from the piano player herself yet. Darn celebrities

7. Something Something West Side Story

How I Found It: I watched the film. Duh

Why I Pursued it: I revel in writing center-left analysis of pop culture and there were some things that struck me strongly. Because the police are much tamer in comparison to the 1961 film and don’t figure in to the conflict as much, I was originally thinking that West Side Story could be called a Blue Lives Matter. Then I started thinking that the heavy reception of this is a celebration against cancellation despite the fact that it’s been praised by so many liberal groups. Where the Pitch Stands:  I don’t have too much confidence that the couple outlets I am aiming for will pick it up. I wrote a little for a conservative magazine before and they just changed their editors so I think if I bombard them with the best of my previously pitched material and some topical stuff like this, they might at least respond with what they’re looking for and I can better get in the door. I also think if I write something good, I can just circulate it around everywhere

Every Piece I've Written on Cancel Culture

 

Back in the day, I was just a happy-go-lucky liberal. However, while I still vote democrat at every opportunity and have even campaigned for the Democrats, I have faced a dogmatic form of nastiness by people who claim they are acting for the marginalized while often glorifying themselves.

The dark sides of intersectional activism, dogmatism, the transitive nature of wokeness are things I write about and I try to find a balance between the right and left modes of thought in those pursuits and show there's nothing particularly anti-progressive about questioning excessive wokeness.


TV Fanatic:
Do the Recent Blackface and Voiceover Controversies Mean We Should Restrict Art?
https://www.tvfanatic.com/2020/07/do-the-recent-blackface-and-voiceover-controversies-mean-we-shou/

The Federalist:
1. How The Media Uses Twitter To Exacerbate Cancel Culture (thefederalist.com)
2. We Won’t Solve Racism By Blacklisting Liam Neeson (thefederalist.com)
3. Film Critics' Wokeness Is Reinstituting A Moral Code For Movies (thefederalist.com)
4. High-Profile Films Show How To Bravely Discuss Race In 2018 (thefederalist.com)This film responds to the allegations that the "safe film" made by a white film maker and criticized for being politically incorrect, "Green Book", was any less daring than the politically correct films that stick to the types of narratives that "progressive" film critics champion

American Conservative:
Film Criticism's Identity Crisis
Film Criticism’s Identity Crisis | The American Conservative


Self-Published on Medium:
1. Media's Role in Discouraging Discourse
The Current State of Discourse is Through Indirect Media Sniping | by Orrin Konheim | Jul, 2021 | Medium

2. My take on the Recent Critical Race Theory in Schools
Medium

3. Looking at the Bias of the AV Club Newswire over a Single Week
https://orrinkonheim.medium.com/av-club-news-wire-proves-it-cant-be-trusted-yet-again-with-a-slam-on-ellen-degeneres-694c3a98210a

4. Oscars in the Age of the Asterisk
Oscars in the Age of the Asterisk | by Orrin Konheim | Medium

5. The Dr. Seuss Controversy: The Problem with Private Corporations Can Self-Censor Argument
The Problem with the “Private Corporations Can Self-Censor if They Want” Argument | by Orrin Konheim | Medium

6. If Cancel Culture Doesn't Stick, Neither do Microaggressions
OK, so cancel culture doesn’t stick, but neither do microaggressions | by Orrin Konheim | Medium

7. There is no Acceptable Reason to Deny Curt Schilling a Hall of Fame Slot
There is no acceptable reason to deny Curt Schilling a Hall of Fame | by Orrin Konheim | Medium

8. Does Cancel Culture Really Hold People Accountable?
Cancel Culture Holds People Accountable. Isn’t that Good? (Hint: No) | by Orrin Konheim | Medium

9. Is Hollywood really that Anti-Black of an Institution?
Is an anti-black Hollywood a myth? | by Orrin Konheim | Medium

10. My Open Letter to the Falls Church School Board Against Changing the Names of George Mason and Thomas Jefferson High Schools:
Why I Vote to Keep Thomas Jefferson and George Mason as School Names | by Orrin Konheim | Medium

11. What Identity Politics Misses: It's Not an Absolute
What identity politics misses: It’s not an absolute | by Orrin Konheim | Medium

12. If You Really Want to Call the Movie "Soul" Racist, Fine, It's Racist. Now What?
If you really want Soul to be racist, fine, it’s racist | by Orrin Konheim | Medium

Six More Stories Behind the Stories

 

1. Savannah Connect Magazine- An ordinary art student with an interesting major https://lnkd.in/dPrz99n

This is a story for Savannah Connect—an alternative weekly in Georgia’s second biggest city-- about a college senior and her first professional art exhibit. My relationship with Savannah Connect is one in which I don’t have any choice over what I report. The stories I get are pretty standard. In this case, for instance, there wasn’t a lot I could initially discern on the surface about why this one artist is different than any other artist being featured in a gallery. It’s more of a challenge in Savannah because the city’s youth scene is dominated by alumni and students of the Savannah College of Art and Design.

So the challenge on me is often to take a pretty ordinary story and spruce it up. Oftentimes, I discover the angles I want to take along the way as I’m having the conversation. In this case, I thought her relationship with her father and her unusually transient childhood (she was born to 19-year-old college freshmen and lived in student housing) were interesting points. More importantly, she was actually not a traditional major of art but rather sequential design which is the study of making comic books. That was something I never heard about which meant I was onto something. The story had to be about her current paintings so I had to strike a balance 2. Podium Magazine- Perennial Fourth Place Finisher Achieves His Dream and Mysteriously Retires Before Olympics

https://lnkd.in/dkCEgMj This is one of the story's I'm most proud of this year. Andy Bayer was the unlucky 4th place finisher at both the 2012 and 2016 Olympic trials and finished 4th in two world champion trials, before finally making the team in 2019. This year, as his shoe company dropped his contract, he decided to retire right before the Olympic trials despite a high world ranking. I previously asked a quote from him for a story so I decided why not contact him and ask why he retired and maybe that’s a fascinating story. The story eventually got approved by podium magazine I love track and field, this was a joy but also because a retired athlete is WAY better to interview than an active athlete. No answers have to be softened to appease a coach, teammate, or PR company. It also helped that I ran track and watched it quite a lot, so I was able to talk shop with him with a lot more intimacy.

3. Zebra Magazine- Opening of Reagan National Airport’s New Terminal Feels Like an Ordinary Tuesday to Most This article happened because I heard about an event after it happened. My parents volunteer at Washington Reagan National Airport and they called me one day to tell me that members of the press were having a tour of the new terminal. I had just read an article about the significance of this new terminal by Dan Zak of the Washington Post: DCA airport's infamous Gate 35X is gone but not forgiven. Briefly, the story goes like this: In 1997, when the new DCA terminal came to be, there were plans to build a terminal for smaller regional planes that never came to fruition so far 24 years, passengers for those flights had to endure a crammed shuttle and long wait out on the tarmac. “Gate 35X didn’t qualify as a municipal quirk, like Washington’s lack of a J Street. Gate 35X was just a bus station. In an airport…..Even worse, these indignities weren’t bifurcated by class. On Capitol Hill, that upper class includes several congressmen whose home districts fall in those geographical cracks between the urban centers that are only served by regional routes. Congressmen weren’t the only wealthy people to feel the discomfort, but they did have a national microphone to air their grievances which is how Gate 35X got upheld as the epitome of air travel failure in congressional hearings,” wrote Zak in the aforementioned article.

So when I got a call, I thought this is a great idea. However, I got there too late. Still, the tour was done 3 days before the grand opening so I decided to pitch a scene piece where I’d report on opening day. I started a dialogue with an editor I had worked with before at Zebra Magazine. She was interested but we had to negotiate whether this was on spec (not guaranteed publication) and while I had the support of the media relations team behind the airport, they were unwilling to give me a first-hand tour. The article was also complicated by a partially true concern over whether people (most importantly, airline and airport employees) were willing to go on the record (newspapers traditionally like first and last names). I think scene pieces (a cross between traditional reporting and a tone poem describing a time and place) can generally be a whole other level of writing when done right. But there was some definite concern over this one. Fortunately the interweaving of Dan Zak’s wonderful article, statistics provided by the media team, and knowledge of a flight that was delayed and my observations and quotes gave an article that my editor was really pleased with.

4. Today I Found Out.com - The United States' First Trip to the Olympics

Since watching the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, I’ve always been an enthusiast for the games. In fact I’m simultaneously excited for the Tokyo Olympics and dreading just how much my schedule will be upended by being glued to the television.

I did a number of pieces on the 2012 Olympics for Mental Floss after catching and pitching the editor on Twitter and that opened the door for this article for the 2016 Olympics on the very first US delegation to the inaugural Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. I’ve recently started to love deep historic research and a lot of times, I think back to a specific source of mine rather than just blindly google. In this case, there was a fascinating book I read years before I pitched the article at my local library. Because my local library didn’t carry it, I went to the Library of Congress reading room or as it is better known the Hogwarts of D.C.

 

 

5. Falls Church News Press- Apartment Safety Procedures Throughout Pandemic Has Limited Lifestyle Benefits

https://www.fcnp.com/2021/04/16/apartment-safety-procedures-throughout-pandemic-has-limited-lifestyles-benefits/ This article is a pretty weak product by any standard and I’m actually pretty proud of it. The reason is that while I consider journalism to be art, that doesn’t mean journalism doesn’t have constraints that a good journalist must abide by. Journalism isn’t novel writing or poetry. There’s an industrial component to it and it’s absolutely essential to the profession that something has to be produced by a deadline. Oftentimes, I make the mistake of treating every article I write like it must be held to a certain standard of quality when that is simply not necessary from the perspective of my editor who simply needs to fill some space with certain articles. When push comes to shove, sometimes it’s necessary to shut off the off the “I have to make this good” part of my brain if the deadline is approaching.

This is what happened on a Tuesday when both an initial assignment idea and a back-up assignment fell apart. The editor and I put our heads together and thought of something that was passable so that we could fill half a page and legitimately fulfill the promise to the paper’s advertisers of having real-estate related content (not something we ordinarily do). And trust me, racing around town and trying to find anyone to go on record within a five or six hour period, while not desirable, was an adrenaline rush. 6 The DC Line-Swimply Pool App

I read an article somewhere on a tech blog about a pool sharing app that worked like Uber in the way that the app facilitated the rental of pools as a third party. My article was written at the height of Summer in the pandemic so I felt as if I was vicariously living through the lives of Swimply users who got to explore the luxury of different pools as swimming access was so scarce. Although I did many interviews for this article, I greatly enjoyed my interview with the company founder because he did a really good job explaining the simplicity of his idea and its execution. He used Google Earth to look up backyard pools in the suburbs of Long Island and knocked on several doors to ask if the owners of those pools would be interested in renting out their pools through a new pilot app. Hundreds slammed the door on him but he had four takers and that’s all it took to start his business. Talk about entrepreneurship.