What's your angle?
“What’s your angle?” is a question every reporter gets asked, usually by a hired communications or public relations professional when we’re asking for interviews or a comment on a story. It is a fair question because reporters have some general idea at least of the story they’re working on. But I always explain this in my introductory call/email. So, “what’s your angle” is often a way of getting a reporter to talk more and accidentally say something about whether they’re writing a puff piece or something more critical that will make them look bad.
But the truth is I sometimes don’t have “an angle” when I start reporting a story. I have a question. So I tell them what my question is.
For my most recent story, my question was about wildfires. Specifically, we at Motherboard have gotten many PR pitches regarding startups focused on “solving” the wildfire crisis over the last few years. My question was: What are these companies actually doing? And will it help? Or is this more of the same from an industry that has previously made big promises to solve huge societal issues with little or no results?
In general, feature stories usually start with questions, which you report out, and the reporting leads to an angle. That’s a jargon-y way of saying that you learn stuff and then write what you learn. And that’s exactly what happened here.
When I started reporting this story, I had no idea what my “angle” would be. But as I spoke to more and more startup founders/venture capitalists, I heard a recurring theme. They all think fire is like cancer. “An analogy we always talk about is cancer detection,” one startup founder said. “Catch the cancer at stage one, hit it with really aggressive treatment, and never allow it to get to stage four.”
Most every VC/startup person I talked to for the story used some kind of health care analogy similar to this one. And every wildfire expert I talked to hated it. They said the wildfire problem is not like cancer at all and this is totally the wrong way to think about it. And if you’re thinking about the problem the wrong way, you’re unlikely to be a part of the solution.
I’m grateful to have worked on this story because I gained a much deeper understanding of the wildfire problem and how to make it better. I heard about some incredible things happening on Indigenous land where cultural burnings are making a comeback, demonstrating that a healthy, sustainable forest has essentially zero to do with cancer treatment. And I gained a broader understanding of what “technology” is. If we continue to think of it as just a bunch of computer chips or lines of code, we’ll never seriously tackle any of the huge problems facing our world. I hope you’ll take the time to read it.
Other Stuff I Wrote
New York may have actually lost riders by building an $11 billion train station
Why air quality readings vary so much during wildfire smoke events
NHTSA, an agency that sucks in almost every measurable way, has taken the time to interfere with a popular right-to-repair law coincidentally using the same discredited scare-tactic arguments car manufacturers have been using for years.
A highway collapsed and every politician tangentially involved warned it would cause total gridlock and cripple the economy and guess what that never happened everything was fine
I wrote 1,200 words on the War of 1812 for absolutely no reason