Things I didn't know about myself

I talked to a high school class last week about journalism ethics, the tough questions journalists face all the time, and about ethical problem-solving. The students had to write mini-reports about me and about the discussion. The teacher, with a kind note of thanks, mailed me the reports.

Most of them got it right, or at least close: They picked out a quote or an issue that we talked about and wrote about that.

Then there was this lead sentence:

"Most people have at least one thing they struggle with in their jobs, but few struggle with their morals the way Scott Blanchard does."

Thus wounded, I slink away, defenseless. Think of me what you will.

Covering what some consider the 'fringe' demands our best

This story hit home with me. It's not a great narrative, or even a great feature story. It's The Washington Post's ombudsman explaining why he thinks the paper was doing its job when it did a takeout on one of the most visible leaders of the "Birther" movement.

The Post caught flack for story because many people -- readers (and journalists, too, I'm sure) -- think the "Birther" people are wackos, and giving them ink gives them credibility, and giving them credibility is wrong and could even be dangerous.

We caught the same kind of flack a couple weeks ago when we put a Twitter gadget online to pull in tweets from an anti-health-bill rally in D.C.

"why are you covering this like it's a legitimate story?" AdamBeck5 asked. I responded (on behalf of the YDR account): "There were York County voices in a national debate about a huge issue that might be resolved in a couple of days. Seemed timely."

The Twitter widget is its own animal; it's basically just a ticker of opinions and thoughts on a particular topic. But I think it's critical for us to remember that, when we report on controversial issues, people or organizations, we ask questions that need to be asked and answered, and we tell stories about why people are acting in the way they are. If we do those stories well -- if we have context, if the tone is right, if we aim to shed light on the issue and the actors -- we are doing our job.

In fact, in a way, we are doing the best work we can possibly do. People are doing things, trying to accomplish things -- why? what does it mean? who agrees with them? who opposes them? What does this tell us about our society and culture?

Sometimes we assess a policy stance or a line of thought or a course of action -- e.g., the "Birther" movement -- as being so off the charts that to treat it seriously is to undercut ourselves as serious journalists. My argument here is that we do exactly the opposite; we make ourselves indispensable.

The key is to get it right. And to do that, the reporting has to be deep; the writing must tell a true story, keeping spin and lies out; and the piece must not have, as its goal, to discredit its subjects. And to do all that, we have to shed the idea that we're wasting our time on a fringe element that we shouldn't be "legitimizing." We are, in fact, doing good journalism.

Don't make a commitment or anything

Gangrey.com links to this story about nonfiction narrative writer Lawrence Weschler talking about teaching nonfiction narrative at New York University, and saying:

"...it is less a class about reporting methods than it is about the fictional methods that can be applied to nonfictional writing. It presupposes that the writer will try to be fair, but also acknowledges that there is no such thing as objectivity, and revels in that fact. Then we get down to business and talk about all the stuff that’s interesting: form, freedom, irony, voice, tone, structure."

I would propose he could be a bit more rigorous than "It presupposes that the writer will try to be fair."

I'd suggest: "It demands the writer be fair and tell the truth -- not only report things that actually happened and things that were actually said, but portray them in context to tell a true story."

Thoughts?

A storytelling guidebook

This is an older column by Roy Peter Clark, and I'm not sure exactly why it showed up on the Nieman Narrative Digest's Web site just now. I think he wrote it during when the journalism world was abuzz with scandals like Jayson Blair and memoir writers who were admitting they made up stuff about their lives and thought it was OK.

Anyway, since we talk a lot in here about using fiction-writing techniques while dealing with facts only and telling true stories, this is an excellent read and very important to our storytelling work.

Interviewing kids, using as sources

This isn't exactly storytelling related (more ethics than anything), but still, I found it interesting and thought-provoking to read the discussion going on in the comments posted below the story. What are our guidelines here at YDR?

I know I generally make a parent aware that their child has spoken with or is going to speak with me and tell them what the story is about. Usually, they're OK with that. But what about controversial subjects or in cases where overbearing parents might want to edit/control what their children are saying? Is that their right? How should we handle?

I think this might make for a good in-house conversation sometime.

Isaac's Storm: What the author knows and doesn't know

I blogged about this book a few weeks ago, when Hurricane Ike was headed toward Galveston, and speculated it would be a good read. It was.

But one thing bothered me about it (and I've come across it at least once in another Erik Larson book, "Devil in the White City."). He is meticulous about his research; but he also will write as fact something that he has deduced from evidence uncovered during his research.

For example, a guy walking through Galveston smells manure and sawdust. There's no record that he did, no letter to a relative talking about it, or journal entry, or whatever. But Larson knows there was a block-long stable, and construction workers sawing wood to build homes nearby, thus ... the man smelled manure and sawdust.

In another case, he has his main character reading a particular story in the local paper. Again, no direct evidence that he read it. But: the story was the most prominent in the paper that day, and it was documented that this guy read the paper every day, so ... he read it.

What do you think -- is that OK in a historical non-fiction narrative? I will (possibly) influence any discussion by saying: I'd rather he establish the facts (stable existed, construction work existed) and say something like, "He must have smelled manure and sawdust." To me, you are being honest and saying, I can't possibly know this for sure, but it had to be the case.

Steven Johnson, in The Ghost Map, takes that idea a step further in a couple places in that book by saying something like, 'There's no way to know exactly what he saw walking down that street. But a block away there would have been a building ...' He puts you in the scene and suggests what may have happened while admitting he can't know for sure.

Thoughts?

Journalism books

Longtime TV newsman Roger Mudd listed these in a Wall Street Journal column recently. They're not writing books, but they're about our business. Thought I'd pass them on in case they're of interest:

"The Press," by A.J. Liebling
"The News Business," by John Chancellor and Walter R. Mears (this one does have some good stuff about writing in it, Mudd says).
"The Journalist and the Murderer," by Janet Malcolm (lots about how journalists deal with their sources)
"The Elements of Journalism," by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel
"Reporting from Washington," by Donald A. Ritchie (history of the Washington press corps)

Taquitos

Check out this discussion. Thoughts?

Be skeptical

Over on gangrey.com, there are two articles that show how The Fresno Bee was fooled.

Turns out this was false.

If it sounds a little out of the ordinary... maybe it is.

Is the media actually to blame?

I'd like to start up a discussion on something that has bugged me for some time now, but came up again in the wake of the Virgninia Tech killings. In the week after the massacre, students and others at the university turned on the media, kicking them out of university buildings and banning reporters from areas on campus. The reason - many said THE MEDIA criticized Tech's president, Steger, over the administration's response to the killings and injured students.

Here's a story on it:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070425/ap_on_re_us/virginia_tech_president

I'm confused. In the hours and days after the shooting, the STUDENTS, their PARENTS and many employed with the university called for Steger's post and questioned how he handled this situation. How did THE MEDIA become the ones behind these comments and in turn, warrant comments like this one from the AP story - "It's the nature of the press: Make the worst of any situation. That's what sells."?

Is this truly the nature of the press? How often do reporters think of "what sells" when they are reporting/writing? As journalists, do we report the "blame the media" angle, even when we know it's not true? Do we defend ourselves, such as putting in the comments from students, parents and others that clearly show THEY were asking for Steger's post, or do we just ignore it?
Or is this the usual, "blaming the messenger" thing that we see from people when we report bad news, or we ask officials hard questions about how they handled a dangerous, newsworthy situation?

Any thoughts?

Michele C.

Blaming the victim?

The Daily Telegraph in Australia, in addition to making a giant leap of an assumption, has taken a decidedly cold tact in its lead to the Virginia Tech story.

"THIS is the face of the girl who may have sparked the worst school shooting in US history."

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,21576271-5001021,00.html

Certainly, different publications both here and abroad take different approaches to journalism and storytelling for varied audiences, but is it fair or responsible -- when we're still gathering critical details -- to essentially place blame on one dead victim for the deaths of all the others?

Would you say something?

On gangrey.com, user "ben" posts an interesting dilemma. Maybe I'm just posting this for Randy, because I know how much he likes to debate ethics. Anyway, this also sort of goes along the same lines of the discussion we had with Diane about holding a dog abandoned during Hurricane Katrina.

If a source with a chronic disease confided in you that he or she thought about suicide but was "too much of a wimp," would you tell someone? Several reporters post on the entry about what they would do. It's not always black and white.

A Question

Emotion, cheap shots, storytelling and ethics

A while ago I sent an e-mail linking to this story from the St. Petersburg Times about a teacher who committed suicide in a public place. I asked what you thought of the way the writers presented the story, and particularly the ending.
That started a great discussion about how well-written and well-reported the story was, and about whether the ending was a superb stroke of emotion or a cheap shot that shouldn't have made it in the paper.
Some highlights:

• There is dogged reporting and solid writing going on here, for sure. I think it's a good stoyr that obviously started as an investigative piece and then became a quicker-turnaround on a suicide. Some of the major ethical dilemmas here were obviously muted by the fact that you can't libel the dead.
  Here's one minor wet-blanket comment on a strong piece: The final sentence works. It's powerful. But it needs attribution, in my mind. Even something like "About six children saw his body hanging, witnesses said." would not have been any less powerful. (Chris Otto)
• I'm kind of curious about the wife. It said she received the (I'd say distrubing) text message from her husband on Friday, but she didn't report him missing until Sunday. You could almost do a narrative about what she was doing in between the time she received the message and when they found him ...The ending was certainly powerful, but almost Hollywood powerful. Like that is how the movies would portray how a newspaper would do the story... J. Jonah Jameson anyone? (Sue Haller)
• For me, the ending crossed the line well into opinionated. A way existed to end that story just as powerfully without passing judgment on the guy (I mean, c'mon, clearly the writer is saying he was a bad guy for what he did).
  It might even have worked for me if the second-to-last graf about what he put on his job application was moved up to the section where his wife talked about how he loved his job. That way requires a little more intelligence on the part of your reader, I think, to put those pieces together, but I don't think it would have felt like such a judgment on the guy that way. (Amy Gulli)
• I'm not a writer -- just a newspaper reader and I'm baffled about this push for tear-jerker type "news" stories in a newspaper.
  Because I knew there was something to look for in the ending, I might not have been paying attention to what I was reading in the early paragraphs but I had to keep backtracking to grasp the issues, e.g., the day the text message was sent, the day the wife reported her husband missing, the cause for an investigation, the result of that investigation, the cause for another investigation.
  In the end, I didn't like the story. (Jackie Shrader)
• Sorry, man. This is the totally wrong take on this type of the story unless its a second-, third-, or later day.
  All the elements fit. But the ending is the lead:
  On his job application, Stephan Brown said that his greatest pleasure in teaching came from knowing he had a positive influence on a child's life.
  Sometime over the weekend, the Seven Springs Middle School science teacher, under investigation for alleged "inappropriate electronic communications" with a student, drove to the Trinity YMCA and hung himself on the ropes course.
  Six children saw his body hanging there Monday.
  Then go into the explanation of the allegations, his wife, the dog etc. Why bury the most gripping part of the story at the very end? That goes against everything I'm hearing about readers' shorter attention spans. (Rick Lee)

Any other thoughts?