If I didn’t know better, I’d say a certain nameless California governmental agency had consciously created a data dump so convoluted and so user unfriendly so as to force the media to rely on their canned spin on the report, whatever their apparent attempts to be media-friendly might otherwise suggest.
In any case, Journalism 101 and the other stuff I hoped to post Friday evening will have to wait for a bit while my eyes stop burning from eyestrain. If you’re good, I’ll post a picture of “the scar,” so people won’t have to keep asking me how I’m healing up from my operation. (I wish I could remember what the operation was called. “Medial thera-something-oscopy” is all I can remember. Those painkillers were impressive.)
And we’ll see whether the story about the nameless state report makes it into the next edition of the Star or the one after that.
It’s hard to overstate how much the public’s perceptions of the media come from television and movies. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a good television show about the media since “Lou Grant,” and that didn’t even have Mary Tyler Moore in it, so how good could it have been?
In contrast, journalism’s done pretty well in the movies, with more famous movies about journalists — especially newspaper reporters — than I have time to go through. (Fortunately, other people are willing to take on that task.)
Instead, let’s go through what I think are the best three movies about journalism that I’ve seen:
#3: Broadcast News
This 1987 film does a great job of capturing the deadline-driven environment of the media, the screwed up people who work in it, the disparity between those who view it as a calling and those who view it as a job and the weird (and unhealthy) way that even journalists working for the same organization are competing with each other on some level. William Hurt and Albert Brooks give stand-out performances.
My only quibble with this movie is sort of a big one: The “shocking revelation” at the end isn’t. No one in television would have assumed the shoot in question would have used two cameras, as one camera is the standard on essentially all TV news shoots. (The movie also has a very anachronistic point of view about date rape which is jarring for many modern audiences.)
#2: Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical 2000 movie is about a freelance reporter, and gets the feel of being a reporter, especially a feature reporter, exactly right. The shifting power between reporter and source, the strange “are we friends or not” elements to the relationships and the precarious nature of reputation are all there. As a pure slice of life of what it’s like to be a reporter, in all its frustration and joys, is right here. A brilliant film.
#1: The Paper
Except for a silly change to heighten the tension at the end of the movie — in real life, printing presses rip off careless people’s arms, so there’s absolutely NOT anything covering the buttons to stop the presses in real pressrooms — this 1994 Ron Howard film gets it right, from start to finish. Editorial meetings sound in real life just like they do at the fictional “New York Sun” — when the editors go through the news of the day, discarding any that have no New York connections, it could have been word for word from any newspaper editorial meeting in the country — and the desperation, pride and issues are all the ones raised in newsrooms every single day around the country. The tension between getting something right or getting something first, the relative low pay of people rubbing shoulders (at times) with the rich and famous, the joy in being an ink-stained wretch instead of an uptown reporter, it’s all accurate.
The movie’s so good, even the Hollywoodized final scene in the pressroom is forgivable.
Next week, we’ll talk about all the bad stuff they won’t tell you in journalism school.
The San Bernardino County Sun is now hiring entry level reporter positions. Their JournalismJobs.com ad reads in part:
The Sun in San Bernardino has reporter openings to staff community news sections. The Sun, with a daily circulation of more than 70,000, is seeking energetic candidates who want to report and write across a broad range of community-focused topics. The community news section will cover everything from a youth sports to senior citizen activities to local politics to advancing a play at a high school. This is an entry-level position but often provides opportunities to write for the daily. One year of daily or weekly newspaper experience preferred but we will consider strong college graduates with demonstrated ability and experience.
Ah, the sweet sounds of dues being paid. Paying your dues at a 70,000 circulation paper owned by the LA Times ain’t a bad way to get started, though.
In journalism, “writer” and “reporter” are often used interchangeably — JournalismJobs.com doesn’t even have a “reporter” job category, just “reporter/writer” (although, strangely, they have a “writer” category, too) — but realistically, they’re two separate, but related job skills.
Writing is just that: the art of communicating with the written word. Crafting a compelling headline, developing an informative but readable lede, structuring a story well, evoking the right images with the judicious use of description, metaphor and simile, these are all the tools of the writer’s craft.
Reporting, on the other hand, is getting the story, the whole story, so help you God. It involves knowing what questions to ask, when and how to ask them, getting people to talk who don’t want to and being able to follow a story to where it’s really going, rather than where the editor back in his office thinks it should go.
Every print journalist is a mix of the two skills, and rarely in equal portion. Every newsroom has the reporters sweating blood over every story, unable to craft a lede on deadline if their life depended on it (which is certainly how it feels at times). Clunker headlines, stories slashed to the bone by editors and stiff and dull language are the debris that reporters who have little writer in them trail behind. When I was at the Potomac News, we’d gather around the desk of the education reporter more nights than not, helping her get her lede done and trim the story down to its required size before deadline, because, as good of a reporter as Sandra was (and she really was a good reporter), some aspects of writing were utterly alien to her.
In contrast, writers with little reporter in them tend to write beautifully and, until you sit down an examine the story carefully, informatively. Once you look at them closely, though, you’ll see there’s not much content to it. There are obvious questions unasked, unsupported conclusions and fun-but-pointless quotes. There are probably more of these folks around than pure reporters: They tend to survive quite well in newsrooms and thrive under deadline pressure. They don’t win any journalism awards — although they can and do certainly win them for their writing — and if they don’t make any great waves, they follow the Peter Principle and rise to the level of their own incompetence.
The problem, though, is that while writing can be taught — there are naturally gifted writers, but mostly it’s a craft, not an art, especially when it comes to journalism — there’s only so much that can be taught to a would-be reporter who doesn’t have the right gut instinct. You can teach them tricks, like when to ask a tough question (late in an interview), the 5 Ws (and one H), how to not phrase a question (don’t ask yes/no questions, since they don’t provide quotes of any real length) and so on. But, at the end of the day, you either have more balls than brains and a huge streak of curiosity/nosiness, or you don’t.
In contrast, the reporters may have problems like Sandra did with writing on deadline and crafting a lede well, but they get the story. At the same paper, I worked with perhaps the best cops/courts reporter I’ve ever worked with, Kari Pugh. Kari, who was 98 pounds soaking wet, was the darling of all the police in the area. She got access to areas few civilians ever saw and got information (both on and off the record) no other reporter could touch. She’d breeze back from a horrible accident on Interstate 95 and toss around grisly Polaroids she’d taken of the scene she would be using as a visual reference for writing her story — not only would she be allowed that close to an accident scene, the police trusted her enough to let her pull out the camera and start shooting. She got stories no one else did, told the readers things no one else could, and made it look easy. Her writing rarely sang — it was workmanlike, reliable and sturdy, but not particularly sexy — but her stories were hard not to read.
When it comes to working on skills, it’s best for an aspiring reporter to focus on the reporting skills. So long as the writing is up to the high school graduate level, and features complete sentences, decent spelling and a sufficient English vocabulary, they’ll be fine. If you can’t master the 5 Ws (and one H) and the other basics of reporting, the prettiest images and cleverest alliteration won’t do a thing for you.
(Where do I fall in this continuum? Probably more on the “writer” side than the “reporter” side, I’m sorry to say. I have to re-read all my stories to make sure I didn’t forget something crucial, and I sometimes have to call sources back to ask them questions I should have asked the first time around. This is BAD when it’s a one time shot at asking a question, as you might imagine. But I’m doing my best to improve.)
Next week, we’ll take a break and talk about the three best movies about journalism.
