Here, fluffy, fluffy

By Cristin Nelson

“Working their way up the food chain” (The Boston Globe, June 24, 2015) called to mind today’s in-class discussion about fluff.  The lede begins:

“If your only culinary experience involves watching TV food shows, you might think cooking is always creative, glamorous work—developing recipes, designing meals, living the life of a celebrity chef.

“But if you work in the restaurant industry, your reality may be quite different: long hours, repetitive tasks, low pay, high stress.”

The focus of the article is on free culinary classes offered by nonprofit organizations, which are designed to provide marketable skills to unemployed or underemployed people.  On a superficial level, the lede makes sense, but in reality the connection between the lede and the rest of the article is very weak.  The important story here should be the job-training benefits provided, not the workplace environment of a chef.  A later quote from a staff member (“We don’t claim to be training chefs… What we’re looking to do is put someone into a better position to get an entry-level job in a restaurant kitchen”) is related to the idea in the lede, but comes off as defensive.  And, if this quote really is related to the lede, it throws a defensive tone over the lede, as well.  Are there people who suspect that these nonprofits are using funds to launch glamorous culinary careers and need to be convinced otherwise?  Perhaps.

The conclusion is that if the lede is, after all, appropriate for the ideas written here, then I believe it is missing the better angle and the true societal weight of the story, which should really be on the impact these nonprofits are making in the community.  If it is inappropriate—well, then it is fluff.

A separate note is that based on today’s lecture, I am unsure about the structure of the article.  It briefly profiles two separate programs offering cooking classes, gives statistics about their enrollment and post-program employment numbers, and interviews staff as well as one program graduate.  It is not an inverted pyramid, because the second nonprofit isn’t introduced until the last third of the story, but the intention from the beginning seems to be to showcase multiple organizations.  It isn’t an hourglass or a narrative, because it contains no real narrative.  And it isn’t a donut, because the lede isn’t an anecdote that we return to at the end.

I believe the donut could have been the most effective structure for this piece, not only because an anecdote could make a very nice lede here, but because I would have liked to see some larger issues discussed in this case.  This is, at its heart, an article about measures being taken to help jobless folks get back on their feet, and some recognition of big picture unemployment issues or statistics would have been appropriate.