We’ve talked about the star power of the anecdote in storytelling.

Here’s yet another example.

Sarah Needleman at The Wall Street Journal sent out the following query on HARO:

I’m seeking small-business owners who struggle or used to struggle with reprimanding employees for poor performance or bad behavior. But I need more than just someone who can speak generally — I need an owner who can offer an anecdote that illustrates this problem. Maybe an owner was uncomfortable giving a stern talking to an employee who chronically came in late and then other employees started coming in late. Maybe an owner didn’t want to take sides between two fighting employees and one ended up quitting, resulting in a sudden staff shortage. The anecdote doesn’t need to be earth-shattering, just a real example of how hard it can be to be the tough guy or gal in a small work environment.

In short, she wants to ensure her story comes across as real through ”an owner who can offer an anecdote that illustrates the problem.”

Fast-forward to the actual article “Tough Love Isn’t Easy to Give” and those anecdotes come in the form of five companies:

• Just Salad: Didn’t confront a poor performer who eventually got the ax
• America By Mail: Too soft on a single dad who wasn’t doing the job
• 2 Hound Design: Ignored a micro-manager who spied on employees
• Tyler Barnett PR: Employee kept calling the big boss “buddy” and “pal”
• Trye & Associates: Receptionist continued to break rule eating at her desk

It’s revealing to look at Needleman’s original query that zeroes in on business owners “who struggle.”

That’s what creates the mini drama.

Personally, I’d like to hear more about the receptionist who preferred to dine in during ALL office hours.

Was she sneaking in a couple Bonus Jacks in her purse to nibble on throughout the day?

Did she offer snacks to her colleagues (perhaps reducing the company’s take from the vending machines)?

How did she respond when scolded that she shouldn’t pick up the phone with her mouth full?

And how the heck does a receptionist end up spilling coffee on the guts of a phone system, ruining it beyond repair?

I suspect there’s another good story waiting to be told. 

Back in October, I resurrected the “Iron Reporter” to compare how two different publications covered Siemens’ high-speed train in Russia.

It was interesting to see the two reporters, Andrew E. Kramer from The New York Times and Paul Glader from The Wall Street Journal, take distinctly different paths in their storytelling.

Both pieces reflected the quality one would expect from two of the more prominent newspapers in the country.

But I did take a jab at Glader wondering why the Journal would “go through the trouble and expense to fly Mr. Glader from New York to Russia” for a story that appeared one month after the news was in the public domain.

I now have my answer.

Glader was good enough to drop me a line which provided the context.

It turns out that he had traveled to Russia on a personal vacation; i.e., his own dime, so the Journal did not fly him to Russia.

Instead, he wrote on the Siemens’ high-speed train as well as on St. Petersburg for the Times’ travel section to simply add to the learning experience during his travels.

In addition, the piece was earmarked for the Journal’s Marketplace section, not the front page where long-form narrative still lives.

This explains why the investment picture (global spend on the train biz) served as a major theme in the story. And why much of the “texture” from his journey on the infamous Red Arrow train didn’t make the final story aside from a quote from the Red Arrow’s captain.

Obviously, Ishmael’s Corner doesn’t benefit from an ombudsman (not in the 2010 budget) but I can still hear the ombudsman’s voice calling out my decision to highlight one of his Glader’s personal tweets as a bit of a cheap shot.

That was unfair and I apologize.

Any company would prize 20 column inches plus a photo on the front of The Journal’s Marketplace section.

That’s exactly what UPS enjoyed in the article titled “UPS Thinks Outside the Box on Driver Training.”

The piece makes for a good mini case study on the type of storytelling that plays in the business media.

Note the absence of a news release.

This is a one-off feature.

While the writer packages a phantom news hook in the lead graph around what appears to be a recent problem - a large percent of driver candidates wash out of the traditional training - we learn later that the solution to the problem commenced in 2007.

This is not new, and that’s OK.

But the lead graph does illustrate the power of a “negative” in storytelling:

Vexed that some 30% of driver candidates flunk its traditional training, United Parcel Service Inc. is moving beyond the classroom to ready its rookies for the road.

Most companies wouldn’t release a statistic that reflects poorly on its performance, even if it’s in the rear-view mirror.

Yet, UPS recognizes the negative stat creates the door-opener to the story.

As discussed in previous posts, without being open to sharing what’s been done in the past, the reporter has no context to understand the significance of what’s been achieved in the present. The larger the distance between “what was” and “what is,” the greater the drama.

In the case of UPS, the new training has reduced the washout number to 10 percent.

Further showing an understanding of storytelling, UPS delivers (couldn’t resist) access to The Journal reporter so she can see with her own eyes what goes down in a training session.

Again, most companies would take a pass on this technique; i.e., what happens if the reporter, God forbid, sees a mistake?

Well, the reporter did see a mistake:

Mr. Byrnes hopped back in and started up. “Stop! Stop! Ugh!” yelled Mr. Keys. He picked up the cone. “This is a kid who was playing football around your vehicle and went to get his ball.” Mr. Byrnes looked shaken and slapped his forehead. The lesson stuck: At the next stop, he checked for cones.

And you know what? It’s OK.

If anything, it brings a realness to the story.

Of course, The Journal needs to remind folks that it devotes features to topics, not companies; hence, the obligatory paragraph on other companies testing novel training, including UPS archrival FedEx, which offers this amusing comment:

FedEx Corp. says it, too, has moved toward more hands-on learning in the past five years, although it adds the change wasn’t prompted by a high failure rate among trainees.

Ouch.

It’s always a compelling read when a relative unexpectedly throws a dart.

Still, the article quickly reverts back to the topic at hand and leaves the reader with a positive feeling about UPS.

I didn’t conduct exhaustive research, but best as I can tell the last time UPS played the training card was back in 2007 in Fortune when it first introduced Integrad:

On Sept. 17, UPS opened its first-ever full-service pilot training center, a $34 million, 11,500-square-foot, movie-set-style facility in Landover, Md., aimed directly at young would-be drivers and known as Integrad. The facility and curriculum have been shaped over three years by more than 170 people, including UPS executives, professors and design students at Virginia Tech, a team at MIT, forecasters at the Institute for the Future, and animators at an Indian company called Brainvisa.

So while the innovative UPS training does sit in the public domain, the new hard data - 1,629 trainees have completed the program with a 90 percent success rate - allows The Journal to revisit the topic.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal included an article that caught my attention.

Titled “New Google Hire Takes Aim at Apple,” the piece - can’t bring myself to call it a story - recounts how a Google employee ( Tim Bray) recently poached from Sun used his personal blog to say nasty things about Apple’s mobile phone strategy.

“It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers,” Mr. Bray wrote on his personal Web site. “I hate it.”

Can you imagine?

A company criticizing a competitor.

Perhaps with Madoff fading into the background, The Journal has a surplus of investigative bandwidth.

Let’s put it this way, John Letzing’s digging wasn’t exactly Woodward and Bernstein.

Because a proper investigation would have showed that on December 3, 2007 the said Tim Bray wrote a post on his blog called “Hate Apple Day.”

That’s right.

His hate for Apple has nothing to do with joining the Google gang. The emotional torment has been going on for some time.

But it gets better.

It turns out Mr. Bray hates other things as shared on February 9, 2007:

I so hate Aeroplan, Air Canada’s frequent-flyer program. I have many hundreds of thousands of points, but in recent years it became increasingly impossible to use them.

I could go on, but I don’t want to show up Mr. Letzing.

Maybe there’s now a beat at The Journal called raking blogs.

After all, Mr. Letizing wrote an article last week that started:

The former chief executive of Sun Microsystems Inc. wrote on his personal blog Tuesday that Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) Steve Jobs once threatened to sue the company in 2003.

The Wall Street Journal nails the story “Huge Pipeline Delivers Bonanza to Towns on Route.”

What makes it compelling?

Let’s start with timing.

After slaving on this 1,679-mile wonder, the last leg is now being laid and welded. The end is literally in sight.

With a helping hand from REX’s PR department, Journal writer Ann Davis offers ample quantification:

• Last leg of the pipeline cost $6.7B

• Used 1.4M tons of steal

• Welded 110,814 sections of 42-inch pipe

• Negotiated with 6,530 landowners for rights of way

Side note: Can you imagine? I can’t even get my neighbors to trim their avocado tree hanging over our front yard.

• Worked 27 million man-hours

• Created 10,000 jobs

• Reduced the premium the East pays over the West to 17 cents per million British thermal units from $2.77

I’ve evangelized the power of the anecdote, which Ms. Davis showcases throughout the piece starting with misplaced varmints:

“To avoid disturbing the endangered Indiana bat, crews in Ohio had to clear trees in the dark and in warm weather when bats wouldn’t roost. Biologists monitored their every move.”

Nice touch bringing in the binocular brigade for a little tension.

But the best anecdote comes from the periphery:

Dry cleaners are starching uniforms for welders so sparks will bounce off their clothes and not burn holes.

Good imagery. I’m guessing the heavy starch box gets the checkmark.

And rather than shackle the pipeline with esoteric nomenclature, the good folks from Kinder Morgan Energy Partners dubbed the pipeline REX. Even I get the double entendre to the land of oil and gas, TEX.

Aside from a few pesky analysts questioning Kinder’s financial return, this is a feel-good story that delivers.

Kinder’s president of natural-gas pipelines and COO Steven Kean sums up the undertaking with the Zen-ish reflection:

“Everybody really needed the pipe. The question was: Who was going to build it?”