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Confessions of an Old Reporter
I spent 31 years as a reporter for a small-town newspaper. I want to make it clear it was a small-town newspaper, which is not the same thing as the mainstream media, if for no other reason than the reality a small-town reporter is closer to his subjects than a reporter for a newspaper in a major urban centre. (Forgive me for the occasional Canadian spelling.) It was a newspaper serving a strongly conservative community, in what was once called the Bible Belt. I don’t see that term used anymore. Has it fallen out of fashion? That made it possible for me to be conservative.
With that in mind, I find myself troubled to hold the media in as much contempt as I do at present. It bothers me to be contemptuous of people in an industry that provided occupation for many years. What follows are random thoughts about reporting.
I always called myself a reporter. I refused to call myself a journalist. I was a reporter. It was a job I took seriously but it was just a job and I never allowed myself to take myself too seriously. I was on the sidelines writing about other people doing things the community care about. I was emphatically not the story. Since when did journalists become convinced that they were the story? I honestly believe newspapers were better when reporters simply considered themselves to be working people.
I was a conservative but I never felt it was my place to guard the Conservative Party, or the Reformed Party, or the Progressive Conservative Party or favoured candidates. I would ask questions, and do my research, and write as honestly as I could, letting readers come to their own conclusions. I interviewed candidates for every party and always, as a matter of integrity, ask them what they believe, why they believe it and what they want to do with their principles.
I was trained to actually care to investigate how people think and act, regardless of their political positions. I was curious. When did the media stop being curious?
One last thing — I believe the print media is in trouble. There are too many ways for people to get information. Small-town newspapers will, however, be around for a while yet because they provide information nobody else can or will — they tell people what’s going on right where they live.
Published in Journalism
Really? I find that surprising: I could see Peter falling for something like that, but Rob seems more realistic.
You know that news value is inversely proportional to geographic distance, right? A fender-bender at the end of your driveway is more interesting than a four car pile-up one town over; a fatal building fire in your county is more interesting than any number of weekend Chicago murders.
The corollary to that is that a small event in a faraway community is not very interesting at all. Small human-interest stories are interesting to a few people, but most of us have a limited attention budget available for such things: distant tragedies have to be correspondingly larger to pique our interest. (The scale is probably logarithmic, though I haven’t tried to quantify it.)
(The exception, strangely, is anyone trapped underground: a dozen trapped miners, a soccer team inexplicably stranded in a flooded cave, a single little girl in a well — for some reason, these are big stories everywhere. Someone should figure out why that is.)
So on a site where people invest their time and energy creating content, it stands to reason that that content is going to be national in scope or address truly significant but necessarily rare local events: we write for attention — in the currency of social media, for “likes” — and that means not spending a lot of time on the local failed restaurant, scandal, or contentious alderman’s race.
Then there’s James Lileks, the wise old owl of Ricochet, who probably actually does care about what’s going on at our local Yando’s Big M Supermarket (one of 18 stores in the Big M Supermarket chain). Maybe Lileks, a truly gifted wordsmith, sold this idea of a Ricochet as the Center-Right Craigslist of Political Thought to the guys. I could see him doing something like that.
I like the quotation marks around “secondly.” I’m an adherent to the “first, secondly, thirdly” school of list enumeration, which has a long and dignified provenance but is, admittedly, by no means obligatory. (It’s a minor point with me, unlike, say, the Oxford comma, which is for me a matter of religion.)
What to do about it? Nothing, my dear. Human nature meets Pandora’s box of technological innovation: there’s no going back. Our challenge is to carve out personal relevance for ourselves and those close to us in a world that daily invents new ways to slake the thirsty reptilian portions of our brains.
I remember loving the career novel David White – Crime Reporter. It was published in the late 1950s, before anyone had heard of journalism. It provided a good description of the on-the-job training for old-time reporting.
“Slakin’ the reptile” sounds like a euphemism for a more specific self-gratification.
I’m sure I didn’t write that — exactly — and I have no idea what you’re talking about.
A bit off topic. Does anyone know of a good book/memoir about working for a small-town newspaper? The protagonist in my fiction WIP, set in the 50s, is a novice reporter at one. Anything would be helpful. My own journalistic experience was at a community newspaper, which helps a little, but isn’t quite the same thing.
Interesting and all news to me.
Odd, but true. I guess you had to be there.
I was there. In fact, it’s in point #7 at the bottom of every page on the site.
Thanks. Nice to know I’m not delusional. I’d forgotten it was there.
I found this on Amazon at a reasonable price. Huzzah! They’ll take it off the shelf today in some bookstore far away and send it to me. The Internet is complicit in the death of newspapers, but, OTOH, it can do this.
As I recall from reading it around sixty years ago, it’s set in NYC rather than in a small town, but it should otherwise reflect the reporting techniques of the time. The author was a crime reporter for the old Herald Tribune. There’s a free scanned copy to borrow at archive.org.
Getting the right techniques and particularly the right language for the era will be a tremendous help.