More details, depth would make this good pub great

Brevity is important, but don’t cut out the hearts of your stories

The two employee profiles that lead off the July/August 2007 issue are too short. Skillfully written, but too short. The profile of Martha Skender begs for these questions to be answered: Why is M.D. Anderson’s post-doctoral program the top workplace for post-doctoral students in the United States? What was Skender’s role in procuring that lofty rating for Anderson’s post-doctoral program? What has she observed in her volunteer work as a floor host who visits inpatients at M.D. Anderson one night a week?

The portrait on the very next page is even more interesting. Dr. Benjamin Lichtiger, chairman of laboratory medicine, comes across as a proud, sensitive, kind and unusually humble (for a departmental chairman in a big research hospital) administrator with an M.D., and a man whose surface, like Martha Skender’s, was only scratched by the reporter, David Berkowitz. I wish Berkowitz had been given three or four pages to plumb the depths of Dr. Lichtiger’s mind.