The Mechanic & the Muse

Impossible dreamers

Thursday's NY Times obit of legendary reporter and gourmand R.W. Apple has some nice writing touches by Todd Purdum, but it also summons up the days when expense accounts could be legendary and the appeal of journalism.

"“Newspaper people love impossible dreams,” he (Apple) once told Lear’s magazine. “I suppose we’re reckless sentimentalists. If we didn’t love impossible dreams, we would not still be working in an industry whose basic technology was developed in the 16th and 17th centuries.”

A good read and proof that even in this bean-counter era we live in, at least we can count on a decent obituary, if not the swollen expense reports Apple was famous for.

"Letters to a Young Journalist"

"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."

A Rookie's Lament

The other day, an email arrived from a a new reporter who says she's having the time of her life. But as many of us know, beginnings can also suck.

For instance, she asks,

"Is it normal for the editor to always want to re-word things, do you suppose, or am I just learning? I am like a kid who 'walks on' to the field in college, playing against the kids who have been in the game since diapers. The only leg I have to walk on, is possibly, a bit of talent for weaving the words. But I have no inside knowledge, I don't know all those grammar rules, I don't know how an editor or 'rival reporter' operates.  I am winging it, teaching myself as I go. One day I turned red because I didn't know what a 'cut line' was."

I felt her pain, not just because I had the same kind of awkward and confusing beginnings when I walked into a 6,000 circulation daily in 1973, devoid of any journalism experience or training. Three decades later, the blank screen or an unforeseen assignment can still rattle my nerves. Here's what I wrote back:

"Young reporters often get their copy rewritten (so do veterans, by the way). What you need to do is print out your story as submitted, and compare it with what appears in the print. Highlight the changes and see if you can understand why the change was made. Sometimes it's arbitrary, but often editors are able to make useful revisions; some that merely reflect the paper's style guide. Ask what style guide the paper relies on. Often it's the AP Stylebook.

"If you can't figure out why the change was made, ask the editor (off deadline) if she or he could help you understand so you can learn. (Some editors, frankly, are assholes, (and for that matter, so are some reporters) but the best understand their role as teachers in the newsroom and may be willing and able to help.

"If you want to know how an editor works, ask if you can shadow a copy editor or editor after your shift is over. Don't worry about getting paid. It's an investment in your career. As for the rival reporter, read his or her stories very carefully. Make it a puzzle to solve: who are his/her sources? Where did they get their stories? Follow their leads; one day someone else will be following yours.

"There are no stupid questions; only reporters too stupid (or proud) to ask them.

"There's no shame in being a rookie.

"Just try to write down the things you learn and keep that close so you don't have to ask twice. 

"Use the Internet: I Googled "glossary cutline" and the first hit , a link to a photojournalist Mark Hancock's site, answered your question:

" A cutline is the caption (text) near a photograph in a newspaper. It informs the reader of who, what, when, where, and why or how about the photograph. Because photographs depict events frozen in time, the first sentence of a cutline is written in the present tense. Additional sentences can be written in present or past tense depending on the publication’s style preferences ."

After that, all I could do was wish her luck.

What would you tell her?

Soup's on!

Several readers starving for a good read wished there was a site where they could find sustenance.

I've mentioned gangrey.com before, but wanted to repeat the nourishing service it offers by flagging great storytelling -- and on occasion, the stories behind it --  from all over. Up high as I write, there's a revealing story pitch from Jimmy Breslin to his editor, Jim Bellows.

(Good luck in St. Pete, Ben.)

 

Good Cop, Great Cop Reporters

I'm spending the week with twenty journalists, all of whom share a common bond: they focus on the tragic, and occasionally the comic side of the human condition, that is, they cover cops and/or courts for newspapers.

This is the second year the Poynter Institute has put "Covering Crime and Courts" on our list of seminars, and even with declining training budgets, the demand from this meat and potatoes beat remains strong. Nearly twice as many applied as we had space for. For those interested in the subject matter, we also feature a free online course in crime reporting, created with Criminal Justice Journalists, on News University, Poynter's joint distance learning project with the Knight Foundation.

We began the list with introductions, (16 Americans, two Canadians, from papers big and small), but went one step beyond name and news organization. We all took a minute to free write about the best cop/court reporter we ever knew and then boil that down to one characteristic.

My goal, as I explained to the group, is to fill the room with the spirit of these great journalists, and let us see what traits makes a journalist stand out.

The seminar runs from last night until Friday night. My hope is they'll scan the list from time to time and ask themselves how they stack up and what qualities they need to work on.

Whatever your job, I think it's important to identify the best practitioners, to ask yourself what makes them great (writing it down helps in the process) and boil it down to one word. You may know the answers from personal contact or from reading or watching. What's important is knowing who is great at the same job you have and trying to learn from their example.

Here's the list of names, and more important, the qualities that make them great

Peter Perl - Courage
Phil Trexler - Storyteller
Maurice Possley - Authoritative
Edna Buchanan (not surprisingly, more than one participant picked Buchanan, the legendary crime reporter for the Miami Herald, and attributed it to more than one quality - Tenacious, Curious
Janet Davis - Passionate
Jason Trahan - Empathetic
Eva Hoare - Tenacious
Truman Capote - Sponge
John Caniglia - Trusting
Renee Lepre - Descriptive
Natalie Pompilio - Compassionate
Rick Bragg - Voice
Susan Bardwell - Rolodex
Matt Lait & Scott Glover - Exclusive
Kenny Stephens - Inquisitive, Insightful
Sari Horwitz - Dedicated
Mike Connelly - Insightful

Who's the best crime and/or court reporter you know and can you sum up -- in a single word --what makes him or her stand out?

Salute to J-Prof

James Glen Stovall is a veteran of the college journalism class and the newsroom, and the author of several journalism and mass communication texts.

This past weekend, I brought home one of his books as part of my research for a revised edition of my textbook.

Before I turned the cover of Stovall's text, "Web Journalism: Practice and Promise of a New Medium," Pearson, 2004), I turned to Google to learn more about the author. (Okay, so I was procrastinating.)  I learned that, after  a quarter century as a professor of journalism at The University of Alabama, he's now a visiting prof at Emory and Henry College in Virginia.

I struck gold a few clicks later when I discovered Stovall's web site, "J-Prof, the web site for teaching journalism. 

The site is a generous repository for journalism teachers and their students. It's embedded with web links along with Stovall's own teaching and examples from contributors. 

J-Prof offers an authoritative take on media law, ethics, story examples and how-to's on do-it-yourself photogalleries, among them a slide show of his own watercolors of football players in motion), along with ways to check on the state of the news media.

Before I knew it, I'd spent nearly three hours exploring every topic on the site's left rail. If you want to learn about journalism and its current state of practice, pitfalls and power, J-Prof is one of the first sites I'd send you to.

Digging deep in San Jose

Many of you, like me, have  read about this already in Romenesko, but I wanted to make sure to bookmark the San Jose Mercury News investigative series, "Tainted Trials, Stolen Justice" (registration required but it works for all Knight Ridder papers) produced by a team led by Rick Tulsky, who shared a 1987 Pulitzer at the Philadelphia Inquirer for a probe disorder in that city's court system. 

Given the exhaustive attention to detail as evident in its online package, and the attention the work is getting, along with the Pulitzer board's acceptance of online content in submissions, I'd expect the package to be in the running next year.

Married to online's tools, such as this Flash presentation of cases, the cross-platform presentation may have its greatest impact online.

In any case, it's the kind of public service journalism (go to the Pulitzer site  and search by category)that Knight Ridder used to be famous for, and the reason I was so proud to work for the chain in its Washington Bureau for 5 years in the early 90s.

A side note: Given the dismaying news coming from KR's business side, it's also heartening to see the valuable work on the Iraq war that's emerged from the Washington Bureau.