I initially called this blog “Dateline Manila” but immediately junked it because the more I read it, the more it sounded pretentious.
Then I tried “Etc.” to suggest that this blog is going to tackle practically everything else outside of my journalism. But I realized that because the name suggested that the blog was going to be all-encompassing, it suggested nothing.
I thought of “Outtakes,” because I intend to put here stuff that gets thrown out or edited from my journalistic pieces but figured that feeding them leftovers might be a little too insulting to my readers.
I finally settled for “NutGraf” because the nutgraf — often the third of fourth paragraph in a story, particularly the feature or news feature, that tells the reader why she should bother reading the rest of it — is at the heart of what I do as a journalist.
I’ve been reporting, as a freelance correspondent, for The New York Times and its global edition, the International Herald Tribune, for close to a decade now and the nutgraf is at the center of practically every feature story that I filed. An editor at The Times once told me: “If you don’t have a nutgraf, you didn’t get it.”
Hence this.
(For more on the nutgraf, read this article by Chip Scanlan of the Poynter Institute.)
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