By Molly Calkins

NEW YORK – Ellen Rosen may have gone to law school, but she has devoted her life to writing about legal events and ideas as opposed to practicing law.  As a legal journalist, Rosen pursues her fascination with the law by writing stories that relate legal proceedings to the lives of ordinary people.
            Rosen’s interests, however, reach beyond the legal world.  A freelancer for the New York Times, she writes stories covering a wide range of business and human-interest topics.  “I think what I like about journalism is that it changes a lot, so you work on a story really intensively for a week or two weeks and then you move on to the next thing,” says Rosen, 51.
            Born in New Jersey in 1957, Rosen graduated from high school in Mamaroneck, N.Y., before attending Brown University.  As an undergraduate, Rosen worked at the college radio station WBRU, where she “got hooked on the news.” Rosen reminisces that, while she cannot remember the details of the encounter, one of her most exciting experiences at WBRU was in 1976 when she shook hands with President Ford and listened to him speak.  Her colleagues at the station included ESPN founder Chris Berman and CNN President Jon Klein. 
            After graduating in 1979, Rosen interned for Tim Russert in the office of Senator Daniel Moynihan (D-NY).  A year later, she started law school at New York University, where she also worked at the National Law Journal.  She enjoyed studying law, particularly the First Amendment, but was less excited by the prospect of practicing law. After graduation, however, she decided to work at a New York City firm.  For the next nine years, she went back and forth working at the firm and the National Law Journal until she felt she had enough legal experience to adequately cover legal stories. 
            Meanwhile she married Michael Zuckert, a crush from Brown, and had two children with him.  In 1992, she left the firm to spend more time with her young children and to pursue writing.  She wrote the KidStuff Survey, a guidebook thatrated children’s books, toys, and videotapes.  After completing this long-term project, Rosen shifted back to newspaper journalism.
            Determined to put her legal knowledge to use, Rosen became the business editor at the National Law Journal, where she worked for five years.
More recently, Rosen has done freelance work for the New York Times and Portfolio.  She was attracted by the ability to write instead of edit, by the variety of subject matter, and by the flexible lifestyle of freelancing.  She writes primarily about legal proceedings, small business, and local news with a human-interest slant.
            When Rosen is stumped for story ideas or having trouble thinking of a lead for a story, she has been known to whip up homemade brownies.  “Michael always laughs about the time I was baking cookies and interviewing the head of the SEC on the phone,” says Rosen.

Rosen discusses her craft in the following Question and Answer.

Q: How did you learn you to write journalistic articles?
A: You just kind of start because there’s not really any one style – especially now.  I think I knew the basics, but you just learn by doing.  There really were no journalism classes at Brown.  My [college] boyfriend’s father [who worked at NBC] said to me, “It’s a complete waste of time to go to journalism school.”  I don’t know that that’s true, but no matter what, you’re going to be taking a low-level, low-paying job when you start, so just go and do it.  Get a good liberal arts education, and then go with it. 

Q: Has obtaining a law degree helped you as a journalist?
A: It definitely has.  It’s a different style of writing, but the basic process of being a lawyer is that you’re investigating, you’re analyzing, and you’re asking a lot of questions, and that’s what you’re doing as a journalist.  In terms of writing a story, it’s a very similar process.  The research isn’t necessarily as heavy-handed, but you do need to be as thorough as you are when you’re on a case.

Q: Do you do much research before interviewing people?
A: Yes, not weeks of research, but there’s so much information that’s out there and accessible right now.  It’s really very easy to look up somebody.  You always tend to look up who they are, what they’ve done, and their background, and, if it’s a legal story, other cases they’ve worked on or similar types of things. 

Q: When you conduct interviews, do you agree to interview off the record?
A: If I have to, I will.  I prefer not to.  The Times hates quotes that are not attributed, so you have to have a very good reason why you’re not disclosing the source.  That stems from Jayson Blair because he was making up quotes, so you have to say, “They won’t disclose their identity because they’re involved with the case.”  Or whatever reason it is that they have a conflict of interest.  If someone says it’s only on deep background, you never use the quote.  I then sometimes circle back and say, “Can I say this?”  There are no hard and fast rules, so you have to define it with them at the outset.  It’s complicated, but I always double-check.  Sometimes somebody will say, “Can I clear a quote?”  I generally will go back and let someone clear a quote because a lot of times their grammar is terrible, so you have to go back to clean up the quote.  If they say, “Can I hear the context?” I will sometimes give them the context in the paragraph.  I never let them read the article first.  Ever.  And they always ask.  I don’t want them to start changing and quibbling with things.

Q: After reporting, how do you prepare to write the article?
A: I usually have thought about it enough that I kind of have it in my head.  The way I write is somewhat [in a] stream of consciousness.  Everybody does this differently; it’s really what you’re comfortable with.  I tend to just kind of write.  Right when I finish my last interview, I write sort of quickly to get something on the screen, and then I go back.  I don’t do my lead until the very end.  I mean I’ll write a general lead but not the lead that I necessarily want unless I already immediately know what my opening line is going to be.  Then I go back and read through my notes again and check notes again to make sure I haven’t left anything out.

Q: On average, how long does a typical story take you to report and write?
A: If it’s a 1,000-word story, which is a lot of what I’ve been doing lately, it can take anywhere from eight hours to 40 hours.  There’s no direct correlation.  It just depends.  Usually you’re writing for a specific space, so that’s going to dictate your length, and that’s initially going to dictate how complicated the story is or how much reporting you’re going to have to do.  Sometimes for even a 100- or 200-word story – the short business story blurbs I was doing at the Times – you can wind up spending an entire day on it, which is not cost-efficient as a freelancer at all.  But sometimes you just can’t help it because something else is interesting, and you wind up going on tangents.  I think a lot of reporters are probably easily distracted.  You just hear one thing, and you want to go into that further.  You never really know where a story is going.

Q: Do you ever have writers’ block?
A: I don’t usually have writers’ block; I have idea block.  The stories I do tend to be between 200 and 2,000 words, so writer’s block happens occasionally if you’re stuck with how to put something together, but the stories aren’t so long.  It tends to be more of problem that sometimes I have no ideas.  You go through like a month where you can’t think of anything that you want to write about, and you start getting nervous about it, and then something comes up and that usually breaks the block.  I mean I procrastinate a lot, and that’s a big problem.

Q: What are your procrastination techniques?
A: I’ve got lots of stalling techniques!  Surfing the Internet, of course, is the number one way everybody who writes and everybody, I think, in general procrastinates.  When I’m really procrastinating, I start cooking.  I haven’t done this recently, but Sara [my daughter] would come home from school, and I’d have a huge fruit platter or freshly baked brownies or something.  She’d say, “Oh, having trouble with your story?”  Occasionally, I clean the closet, but I’m not really big on that.  Occasionally, I go to the gym, but I’m not big on that either.  So there are millions of ways to procrastinate.

Q: Do you ever write multiple stories at one time?
A: I don’t mind doing multiple stories because anytime you’re writing a story, there’s always downtime.  So at that point, if I’m not procrastinating in the kitchen, it’s kind of nice to have something else that I’m thinking about.  Sometimes it’s a little complicated because you’re switching gears, and if they’re so completely different, it’s hard to balance, but it’s just one way of multitasking.

Q: While writing, do you share your work-in-progress?
A: I don’t let anybody see it until it’s official.  Michael [my husband], for example, loves to know what I’m doing, and I won’t even talk to him about it.  I don’t even usually show it to him until it’s in the paper unless I’m really stuck on something.  It makes no sense. It’s very personal, I guess, when you’re writing.  You’re putting yourself out there.  It’s okay when anonymous readers see it but not your own husband.  Go figure.

Q: How do you go about editing your work?
A: I always write it once, and let it sit.  Depending on what the deadline is, I either let it sit for an hour if it’s a quick turnaround, or if it’s a longer piece and I have more lead time, I may let it sit a day and then come back to it.  I find that when I’ve written something, I sort of forget that I’ve written it.  It looks like somebody else’s piece, so I come in and I do an edit, which I think is partly because I was an editor first and a reporter second.  I think it helps, but sometimes you’re horrified at what you’ve written the day before. 

Q: What was you most challenging story to write?
A: I don’t love controversy, in terms of writing about it, so it’s hard for me when I’m writing about a case that’s very negative.  Actually, the biggest challenge: I was doing a story on Ticketmaster, and it had to do with the inability to get tickets online (Ticketmaster Story).  I was trying to get Springsteen tickets, and I went on at 10 a.m., and by 10:01, everything was sold out.  I just didn’t understand how that was possible.  I wanted to do a story on how this happens.  In the course of it, I found out that the Wall Street Journal was also doing this story.  I was doing this for the Times for the personal business section that runs occasionally on Saturdays, and I said to my editor, “The Journal’s doing it, we’ve got to run this.”  She didn’t have the same sense of immediacy that I did, so she didn’t run it.  She held it until Saturday, and sure enough the Journal ran it on Friday, so it got bumped from the front page of the Business section to inside.  I was really annoyed with the editor.  So that was my most challenging – it wasn’t really the topic but the editorial process.  But that’s part of it because you try to impress upon the editors why it’s so urgent, and they hear it all the time, so they tend to tune it out.

Q: You’ve also been on the editorial end of the process.  As an editor, did you assign stories or did people come to you with stories?
A: It works both ways.  In a perfect world, the reporters are coming to you because it’s hard to generate ideas.  It’s really hard now because there’s so much out there and everything’s accessible, which is sort of how things have changed.  I’d see something, and I’d call somebody to do it, beg somebody on staff, make cookies for them…or they come to you.  I’ve been on both sides of it.  Sometimes I’ll pitch something to an editor, and they’ll say, “No, that doesn’t really work,” or “We’ve done that, but why don’t you do this instead?”  It is usually a sort of dialogue.

Q: Where do you get ideas for your own stories?
A: I’ve written for the Westchester section of the Times and that’s more lifestyle, slice of life kind of stories.  Someone I’m talking to might mention something that’s interesting, whether or not it’s something local or in business or [for instance] I did a story on not extreme sports but people taking extreme measures to play sports – like playing ice hockey at four in the morning as an adult and then going to work or playing Ultimate Frisbee at dawn.  I was just having dinner at a friend’s, and a mutual friend brought up this Ultimate Frisbee game, and I thought they were nuts.  But that’s a great story because I hadn’t really read anything like that, and it’s sort of a twist.  You’re always reading about extreme sports, but I’d never read anything about extreme measures or extreme hours.  It’s basically from talking to people that you get ideas and obviously from reading things too (Extreme Measures for Sports Story).  You might see a case that came in or something that’s happened, and you might see some way to advance it.  As opposed to the straight “this is what happened,” there’s some angle to it.

Q: Describe your writing style.
A: I write stories that are sort of featurey in the news section, so I might take something that’s in the news and expand on it a little bit.  Typically I tend to like starting with an anecdote or writing about a person, and then going into the broader story.  I’ll tend to start with a story about somebody or something, and then have the nut graf buried in the third or fourth paragraph.  I’ve been doing that for years because I like that kind of style better, and then just in the last six months, the Times said, “We’re not doing that anymore.”  They said, “We decided to change.”  For no apparent reason.  You’ll still see somebody starting with an anecdote, but I guess because space was limited they decided they want to get to things right away, which is kind of sad for me because sometimes it’s nice to read something that’s a little bit more meandering.  You want to get to the point – I think everyone has a shorter attention span than they used to have – but sill.

Q: How do you get those anecdotes?
A: Sometimes it just comes out because they’ll tell you a story.  When I interview, I have a couple of questions I want to ask somebody – very bare bones – and then I just chat.  That’s my style.  It sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t work, but that’s just how I do it.  That’s how I’m comfortable doing it, just kind of engaging in a dialogue.  Because of that and because I go off on tangents, something will come up that wasn’t necessarily even in the range of what you were going to ask.  And then you learn it, and you think, “Oh, that’s great; that’s interesting!”  And then you might start with that.  A lot of times, it’s real serendipity.

Q: What writers have inspired or influenced you?
A: Linda Greenhouse.  She worked for so many years for the New York Times as a legal correspondent.  She covered the Supreme Court, so she was a huge inspiration.  I like Adam Gopnik, who writes for the New Yorker.  Those are two very different kinds of writers because Adam Gopnik writes about life.  And I like Christian Buckley also, at the New Yorker.  I like reading Peggy Noonan a lot.  One of my all-time favorite writers is Joe Morgenstern, who writes the movie reviews for the Wall Street Journal.  He has very eclectic taste.  He’s a fabulous writer; he’s really good.  He’s probably in his seventies, but you don’t sense any age when you read him because he just gets right to the point, and he has a very good outlook on things.
(Interviewed, edited and condensed by Molly Calkins)

Five Tips on Legal Reporting for the Non-Legal Journalist

Journalist Ellen Rosen recommends these five guidelines when writing a legal story.

1) Look for a human angle to any case you’re writing about, even one that involves business. Personalizing it makes it more interesting and also makes it easier to understand.
2) Read any documents you can get to understand a case. They’re often available online through the electronic docket system known as PACER (http://pacer.psc.uscourts.gov/).
3) Ask the lawyers to explain every term they use. You may feel silly doing so, but remember that readers or viewers won’t all be lawyers and so will want the explanation. Lots of times they like to throw around terms, but it’s often just lingo. You’re explaining something in the general press, so you need to understand it. Use email to get them to explain a term.
4) Make sure to get all. not both, but all, sides of the story. Lawyers are first and foremost advocates and not above using a reporter to get favorable press for his or her client.
5) Finally, be not afraid. You will understand the issues even if you are not a lawyer. And any lawyer who quotes Latin or an over abundance of legalese is just trying to conceal either the weakness of his case or his own lack of understanding.

Links to Rosen’s Articles

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/18/business/18eliot.html?scp=18&sq=ellen+rosen&st=nyt
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/business/06board.html?scp=16&sq=ellen+rosen&st=nyt
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C05EEDA173FF935A25753C1A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&&scp=6&sq=facebook%20rosen&st=cse