The Mechanic & the Muse: "Letters to a Young Journalist"

Reporting

"Made in the Shade"
A package on Southern writers: profiles, interviews and an 11-state directory of writers you may never have heard of but are worth your time. Appeared in Creative Loafing chain.
"Mass Appeal"
A day-in-the-life profile of a telegenic parish priest in Miami. Published in Catholic Digest, reprinted in the St. Petersburg Times
"The Liberation of Tam Minh Pham"
How the first West Point graduate from South Vietnam disappears after the fall of Saigon, only to be rescued by his classmates two decades later. A cover story in The Washington Post Magazine

"Letters to a Young Journalist" is a new book by Samuel G. Freedman, former NYTimes reporter, now a Columbia Graduate School of Journalism prof with six books under his belt. Even more impressive, 35 graduates of his book writing course (sadly, limited to Columbia grad students) have gone on to win book contracts.

I recently interviewed Freedman about the book for my "Chip on Your Shoulder" column on Poynter Online and invite you to check out our e-mail exchange, along with an excerpt from the book. I admire the book very much and I think you'll be inspired by what Freedman has to say about journalism, no matter what your age or experience level. (Some readers of the column who may be new journalists but are not young fault the title; in its defense, it's part of a "Letters to..." series.)

Here's one of my favorite parts of our virtual Q&A:

"Journalists have perhaps never been held in lower esteem. What are the themes or arguments you constructed in "Letters to a Young Journalist" that felt like swimming upstream?

"I felt like I was fighting a two-front war. On the one hand, journalism has inflicted some really grievous wounds on itself lately -- the discredited "60 Minutes" story on Bush, the Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley fabrication cases, the murky connections between Judy Miller and her sources, and so forth. So first you have to acknowledge the damage we've done to ourselves. But the other front is the assault from both left and right on the very idea that there is such a thing as a professional, nonpartisan, open-minded journalist more capable than the average Joe of sorting out human events. Or the belief that all journalists are biased anyway -- the left tells us we're lapdogs for Bush, the right tells us we're traitors -- so why not just go to a more Western European model of ALL news organizations having overt partisan or ideological agendas.

"So I tried to uphold journalism's venerable traits as a response both to the profession's own failings and to the attacks on it from outside. I'm not talking about being merely an adequate, competent reporter. I'm talking about being intellectually ravenous, capable of suspending your own predispositions, willing to entertain competing ideas within your own head, ready to move beyond interviewing experts to the point of achieving a certain expertise yourself."