Pieces like this are my favorite and almost a form a therapy as much as sitting down to a TV show I like. This story is immediately interesting and its writing very quickly became a story of its own, in large part due to the deft and delicacy it was reported with. Marty Baron singled it out on Twitter, which counts for something, too.
Without giving too much away, Bill Murray is famously stingy about publicity and being hard to pin down even by his closest friends. He’ll pop up out of nowhere, and it’s your best chance of ever seeing him. He could walk into my apartment now and I wouldn’t question it.
Clark advises to work from a plan. In this case was, plan on not talking to Murray for a story that is entirely about him, commemorating his receiving the Mark Twain Prize for humor. So Edgers talks to a lot of his famous and instantly recognizable friends to add some ethos to the story. It’s through this that Edgers trudges on. It allows his story to breathe and be different, and indirectly shows his skill in writing about a subject who won’t be profiled.
He chooses to use stories and anecdotes from others as a way to show who Murray is, which works because of the persona that he and the public have helped create.
Clark also advises to work toward an ending, and Edgers does that in the sense that he saves the best story for last, the one that fully encapsulates quintessential Murray. And a few hours later, not to give too much away, Murray adds a helping hand. It’s a really cool moment of internet journalism, and wouldn’t have happened Edgers hadn’t done a good job writing and reporting on the story.