How a coin-convention press release led to a riveting whodunit

First, I’m sorry, but this column needs some pedantic foundation. Bear with me; it will pay off in the long run.

You may recall from your grade school English classes that there are four basic types of writing — narrative, descriptive, expository and persuasive.

In the news business, we tend to reserve the fourth for a special position here on the Opinion page, but you may find elements of the other three sprinkled in various ways throughout the paper. Many, perhaps most, reports are purely expository; they aim only to explain some situation or inform you about some event. Stories rarely are built entirely around descriptive sights, sounds and smells but such details will surely find their way in from time to time. And, entirely narrative stories, more akin to fiction than nonfiction, structured around a discernible plot with various characters and often-chronological events leading to an ultimate conclusion, are even rarer still.

Truth be told, expository writing overwhelmingly dominates the news pages. As one editor once told me, “We’re not writing literature here. We’re telling people what they want to know.” So, when you encounter descriptive or narrative elements in a story, they are usually secondary. And, another truth be told, it requires special attention and skill to work them into a 700- or 800-word report that is our basic standard.

But when writers do manage to blend the three styles into a single story, it can be especially gratifying. Riveting even.

I could list numerous such successes from the Daily Herald in almost any given week, but Eric Peterson’s front-page report on Wednesday about the arrest of two men allegedly trying to fence a stolen gold coin at a Schaumburg coin convention provides a particularly poignant example. Interestingly, it started with a press release.

We get hundreds of press releases a week. For various reasons, it is very rare for one to be publishable as is and they almost always require at least fundamental rewriting to meet our style and standards. But they can be important starting points, leading us toward people, events or issues that may deserve more attention.

The headline on the release Eric received in email on Tuesday from the Central States Numismatic Society certainly did that: “Dealers Recover Stolen Gold Coin And Help Capture Suspects At CSNS Convention / Two suspects allegedly tried to sell missing, rare sunken treasure 1709 Lima eight Escudos”

Now, admittedly there’s a lot for a simple lay person to unpack in those two phrases, but any reporter is sure to smell Page 1 when the words stolen gold coin, suspects and rare sunken treasure appear in close proximity. Throw in the dateline Schaumburg, Illinois, and you have a Daily Herald no-brainer. So, Eric went to work.

Fortunately, he had a good foundation to build on. The association’s release included a wealth of details and relevant quotes from the people involved, and with some follow-up details supplied by an interview with police later, Eric wove them all into a fascinating story that showed how skeptical coin dealers mutated into amateur sleuths and police confidants to identify a stolen item worth $40,000, alert authorities and then stall the suspects until police arrived to cuff them.

Reporters are trained generally to write stories in what we call an inverted pyramid style, where the main news is reported in the first couple of paragraphs and additional details are added paragraph by paragraph, under the assumption that, while some readers may want to know everything, most are going to move onto something else after they’re satisfied they have the basics. Eric’s story follows that structure, but integrates details in a narrative sequence that both describes what happened and how it unfolded and pretty much demands your attention to the last sentence.

Not every story offers the elements for such a presentation, of course. But when one does and when the presentation is managed with care and skill, even a simple report on the discovery of a missing rare coin at a gathering of collectors can offer all the pleasure of a book-length whodunit.

I apologize if my opening brought back the shivers of school-marm memories, but our writers often blend the tools of the language into reporting that is not just informative but also a joy to read. I wanted to call that to your attention and show you a little bit of how they do it.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His book “To Nudge The World” has been named a Book of the Year by the Chicago Writers Association and is available at eckhartzpress.com.