Living Journalism: Principles and Practices for an Essential Profession [2 ed.] 1138549266, 9781138549265

Citation preview

Living Journalism

In this readable, practical textbook Rich Martin explores the core principles and practices that beginning journalists need to produce work that informs and enlightens citizens hungry for accurate and trustworthy news. The textbook’s 16 concise chapters impart real-world examples demonstrating how the best journalists exemplify the key principles, as well as cautionary stories illustrating journalistic mistakes and missteps. It also contains exercises, checklists, tips and additional resources that students can use in class and independent study, making the book an ideal newsroom and classroom resource that can be returned to again and again for new insights. For journalism to survive and flourish in the 21st century, it needs young practitioners who understand its importance to society, believe in and are committed to its core values, and can put those values into action. This new edition of Living Journalism is an excellent updated introduction to journalism for students, teachers and young professionals. Rich Martin was a newspaper journalist for 32 years, including 29 years at The Roanoke Times in Virginia. The newspaper was a three-time Pulitzer finalist for projects he edited. He is an associate professor emeritus in the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he taught for 12 years and served as Director of Journalism Graduate Studies and Journalism Department Head. Living Journalism: Principles & Practices for an Essential Profession (1st edition) was published in 2011. He and his wife now live in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Living Journalism Principles and Practices for an Essential Profession Second Edition Rich Martin

Second edition published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business  2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Rich Martin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Holcomb Hathaway 2011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Martin, Rich, 1949- author. Title: Living journalism : principles and practices for an essential profession / Rich Martin. Description: Second edition. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | “First edition published by Holcomb Hathaway 2011”— Title verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019014435 (print) | LCCN 2019019029 (ebook) | ISBN 9781351001007 (eBook) | ISBN 9781138549265 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138549272 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Journalism—Handbooks, manuals, etc. | Journalism— Technique. Classification: LCC PN4775 (ebook) | LCC PN4775 .M382 2019 (print) | DDC 808/.06607—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019014435 ISBN: 978-1-138-54926-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-54927-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-00100-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

Contents Preface Acknowledgments

vi x

  1 You’ve Got to Be a Little Crazy

1

  2 Stay Curious

13

  3 Get It Right

25

  4 Admit Your Mistakes – And Learn From Them

38

  5 Ask Good Questions

48

  6 Listen Carefully, and Pay Attention

62

  7 Be Skeptical

74

  8 Get Close to Your Story

89

  9 Know Your Place

103

10 Prepare For the Unexpected

116

11 Shine a Light

126

12 Be a Watchdog

140

13 Do the Right Thing

156

14 Remember Your Humanity

168

15 Stand Your Ground

181

16 Commit Journalism

193

Index

202

Preface I had a master’s degree in English but no job. Desperate, I thought that maybe I could be a reporter. But the big newspaper in Atlanta wanted only people with experience; a suburban paper turned me down for the same reason. Then I saw an ad for a police and courts reporter at The Gwinnett Daily News, my hometown paper. I called and was invited in for an interview. The editors asked me lots of questions and then did a mock interview from which I was supposed to write a short story in less than an hour. I made my deadline, but it was agonizing. My story looked like the kind you’d see in the paper, but I wasn’t sure if I had missed a trap that had been laid for me. I must have done all right, though. I got the job. I was going to be a newspaper reporter. I had no clue about how much I did not know. Billy Williams helped me learn. A cigar-smoking veteran who had worked in Atlanta, he introduced me to lawyers, judges, police officers, detectives and, importantly, the clerks and office assistants who knew what was really going on. Billy chatted with everyone, asking about them and their families and, of course, about anything interesting that might have happened overnight. He showed me where to find police reports and how to look up court records, and he counseled me on how to conduct myself when I covered a trial: wear a tie, be on time, sit in the front row, take careful notes, ask questions afterward, and – most importantly – get everything right. Over the next couple of months I continued to watch him and learn from him. He asked hard questions, but he always treated people with respect. I marveled at the ease with which he wrote his stories. They had punchy ledes, while mine were long-winded. His stories said exactly what they needed to say, and nothing more. He wasn’t Hemingway, but he knew that less is often more. Billy Williams probably never thought of himself as a mentor. I certainly didn’t think of him that way during my first year as a reporter.

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But as I got more experience – learning journalism by practicing it in the company of many talented reporters and editors – I came to appreciate what Billy did. He gave advice when I asked for it – and sometimes when I didn’t – and he offered constructive criticism when I needed it, which was often. He was generous with his time and his interest. He exemplified the essential standards that are key to doing good journalism, and he must have had confidence that I would pick up some of the things I needed to learn. I was lucky to work with him. The best journalists care about the nurturing of new ones. The veterans remember the people who trained them, and they want to give something back to a younger generation. Journalism is a fragile craft; practiced carelessly, it reflects poorly on the individual practitioner, the news organization he or she works for, and other journalists as well. The veterans never forget the mistakes they made when they started – I made two in my first bylined story – and they want young journalists to avoid making the same ones or, at minimum, to learn from mistakes they will inevitably make and not repeat them. They know that the best habits and values are instilled early in one’s career. Journalism has changed a lot since I first entered a newsroom – I typed my first stories on an Underwood manual typewriter and used scissors and glue to cut and paste them together on copy paper. When I started teaching journalism at the University of Illinois in 2005, most students still relied on newspapers for much of their information. We didn’t talk about social media – “TheFacebook” launched a year before at Harvard; Twitter arrived in mid-2006 – or know anything about data analytics. Today, of course, news is gathered and disseminated in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, sometimes accurately, but too often with factual errors or mistakes in context. Daily and Sunday newspaper circulation in the U.S. continues to decline. Half of Americans say they get their local news from television, but TV ratings have also dropped. Many Americans, especially millennials, rely on social media for news and information.1 Cable news networks have become more polarized, with many viewers watching only programs that conform with their political positions and opinions. And that polarization has played a role in how Americans view the press. Public trust in news organizations declined from 72 percent in 1976, post-Watergate, to 32 percent in 2016. A 2018 survey found that 13 percent of Americans did not trust any news outlet at all.2 Journalists have become frequent targets of verbal and even physical – and sometimes deadly – attacks.

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And the president of the United States has been outspoken in his criticism, regularly describing many mainstream news organizations as “enemies of the people” that produce “fake news.” It’s a fraught period for the country – and for journalism. Some things about journalism, though, haven’t changed. Many fundamental standards have stood the test of time, and they still apply in today’s high-speed, digital world. Living Journalism is about those core values and practices that beginning journalists like you must develop in order to produce work that informs and enlightens citizens. Each chapter deals with key principles such as developing a curious and skeptical – but not cynical – mind, asking good questions, paying attention to details and preparing for the unexpected. This book encourages young journalists to provide a voice for people who have little or no influence and to act as a watchdog over those who have power. It emphasizes the importance of developing a moral compass that will provide guidance for the ethical challenges that all journalists face in their careers. Good journalistic mentors are as important as they ever were, but – as newsrooms continue to evolve – it may be more difficult today to find a Billy Williams to serve in that role for you. This book allows you to learn from the experiences of veteran reporters and editors from around the country. Based on research and dozens of interviews, it includes the advice and stories of professionals who can serve as mentors, even if they aren’t able to physically sit beside you and teach you first-hand. As you learn the values and practices you need to perform your work responsibly and thoroughly, you will see examples of how the best journalists exemplify those fundamental principles. You will also see how those principles still apply today, no matter what platform is used to produce and present the news. You will discover how experienced journalists go about their jobs, how they learned to do their work accurately and honestly, and the lessons they have taken away from their mistakes. You will also hear from younger journalists who, not so long ago, were in the same situation you’re in right now – either studying journalism in college or just beginning a professional career. Some have been out of school for a year or two, while others have been working a little longer. Their stories and their advice may provide ideas about what you need to know and what you might experience as a professional journalist in 21st-century America. The best journalists know that solid reporting practices and values are developed and reinforced through experience, and Living Journalism

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is designed to encourage beginning journalists like you to act on what they’ve learned. Chapters include exercises that will send you into the real world to practice new skills and to develop expertise. Some of the exercises are challenging, but all are designed to foster learning and understanding of the fundamentals to help you excel as a journalist. You and other young journalists who follow the examples of the people profiled in this book can eventually become mentors for the next generation of journalists, passing along principles and practices that must survive. That may be your most important legacy.

NOTES 1 Karen Rundlet and Sam Gill, “Beyond ‘Live at Five’: What’s Next for Local TV News?” Knight Foundation, April 5, 2018. 2 Joshua Benton, “Here’s How Much Americans Trust 38 Major News Organizations (Hint: Not All That Much!)” NiemanLab, October 5, 2018.

Acknowledgments Like most journalists, I have been privileged to work with and learn from many smart and talented people. Some are mentioned in this book, but it would be impossible to name them all. Bob Wynn, Gainer Bryan and Bob Fowler hired me at the Gwinnett Daily News in Lawrenceville, Ga. Instead of firing me after I made mistakes in my first story, they helped me learn from that experience. Forrest Landon, Ben Bowers and Barton Morris gave me early opportunities at The Roanoke Times in Virginia. I am forever indebted to the reporters, editors, photographers, artists and other news staffers I worked with there. We did some good work together, and we had some fun, too. My former colleagues in the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign came from a variety of journalism backgrounds, but all of them subscribed to the fundamental values that I describe in this book. My thanks to them for being good role models for our students and for their support of my work. Thanks also to the dozens of journalists whom I interviewed about their experiences. Their commitment to journalism’s core principles is an inspiring example for beginning journalists. I especially appreciate the help I got from these former Illinois journalism students who talked with me about what they’ve done in the early stages of their careers: Reema Amin (B.S. 2012), Tyler Davis (B.S. 2016), Steve Contorno (B.S. 2009), Katie Foody (B.S. 2009), Declan Harty (B.S. 2016), Megan Jones (B.S. 2017), Stephanie Lulay (B.S. 2008, M.S. 2009), Candice Norwood (B.S. 2013), Janelle O’Dea (B.S. 2014), Dan Petrella (B.S. 2006, M.S. 2010), Emily Siner (B.S. 2013), Marie Wilson (B.S. 2010), Maria Ines Zamudio (B.S. 2007) and Christina Zdanowicz (B.S. 2007). I enjoyed getting to know you when you were students, and I applaud your dedication as working journalists. You give me confidence about the future of the business. To Margaret, my wife: Thanks for your love, your support and your edits.

Acknowledgments

xi

Thanks also to Rosie, our dachshund, who daily kept me company as I worked on this edition. She proves you don’t have to be a big dog to be a watchdog. Finally, another word about Billy Williams. I left the Gwinnett Daily News after a year to backpack in Europe. Billy was no longer at the paper when I returned to the States, and I never saw him or spoke to him again. I tried to track him down when I began working on the first edition of this book, but I never found him. A couple of years ago I discovered his obituary; he died in March 2013 at the age of 82. My lasting regret is that I never gave him the thanks he deserved.

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Photojournalist Igor Kostin and his pilot approached the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after a 45-minute helicopter flight from Kiev, Ukraine. Military vehicles scurried around on the ground, until suddenly everything seemed to stop. In front of him, Kostin saw a large hole “like an open grave.” The roof of the plant’s No. 4 reactor, a 3,000-ton slab of concrete, had been blown off by an explosion. “I saw the colors and the unbelievable light,” said Kostin, the first photojournalist on the scene. He had never seen anything like it before. No one else had, either. The helicopter circled 150 feet above the glowing reactor, while Kostin shot pictures of what soon was recognized as the worst nuclear accident in history. His camera jammed after 20 or 30 shots. A second camera also malfunctioned, its motor destroyed by radiation. Back in Kiev, Kostin developed his film, but only the first six or seven exposures survived; everything else was black. He sent the most acceptable photo to his news agency, but the Soviet government suppressed early reports of the accident and blocked the photo’s publication. The explosion at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986, spewed radiation over large portions of northern Europe and what was then the Soviet Union. At least 31 people were killed by radioactivity within two months, and hundreds of thousands of people were permanently displaced. The United Nations estimated that 10,000 people would ultimately die from cancers caused by radiation from the explosion. Groups such as Greenpeace insisted the final toll would be many times higher. Kostin went back again and again to document what happened at Chernobyl. His news agency was willing to let him return, but it would

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not provide him with a car. “You do not understand,” his bosses told him. “A journalist is replaceable, but a car . . . .” Kostin felt ill every time he returned to Kiev. To counter the effects of the radiation on his thyroid, he was told to drink vodka – half a glass for every two hours spent at the disaster site. It made little sense, but he followed the prescribed regimen anyway. In early 1987 he went to a military hospital in Moscow and received blood transfusions that made him feel slightly better. Photographs were not permitted, but Kostin smuggled in a camera and took pictures of other patients who had been contaminated by radiation from Chernobyl. Chernobyl became Kostin’s life’s work. “I felt that history was being played out, and that someone had to devote themselves to it seriously,” he said in 2006. “My pictures are like an instruction manual for the next generation, so that something like it can never happen again.”1

Igor Kostin might strike you as crazy. He would probably have agreed. Journalism, he once said, is not a profession for normal people. He didn’t mean that as an insult to journalists, or to normal people. He meant that journalists rush to the scene of the nuclear accident, the firestorm or the mass shooting to find out what happened and why. Normal people head the other way. Some may find Kostin’s notion peculiar, romantic or even arrogant. After all, while professional journalists have learned their craft and honed their skills over many years, some people believe that anyone can be a journalist. In fact, that is what “citizen journalists” do today, using websites, blogs, YouTube videos and social media to independently report events in their neighborhoods and around the world. Janis Krums, a 24-year-old businessman from Sarasota, Florida, was on a New York ferry when US Airways Flight 1549 crash-landed in the Hudson River in January 2009. Using his iPhone, Krums took a picture of the plane resting on the river’s surface and posted it to Twitter. It was the first photo of the crash scene. “There’s a plane in the Hudson,” Krums tweeted. “I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.” Within a half hour of posting his photo, Krums was giving an eyewitness account of the crash to MSNBC. It’s easy to forget now that Krums’s tweet “changed everything,” as Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey later told CNBC. “Suddenly the world turned its attention because we were the source of news – and it wasn’t us, it was this person in the boat using the service, which is even

YOU’VE GOT TO BE A LITTLE CRAZY

3

more amazing.”2 Just a few months later, an anonymous person used a cellphone to document the violent death of a young woman named Neda Agha-Soltan during election protests in Iran. (The video was recognized as journalism, earning a prestigious George Polk Award for videography. The awards panel said it had never bestowed an honor on an anonymous work before.)3 Social media sparked protests and revolutions across the Arab world in 2011.4 When a massive earthquake hit Japan in 2011, people used social media to share breaking news and information about survivors and rescue efforts. Videos captured the devastation of the tsunami waves as they swept away entire communities. The speed of the Internet ensured that citizens around the world were up to date on the Fukushima nuclear power plant crisis in Japan – the worst since Chernobyl. Social media posts by ordinary citizens have, in fact, become a common resource for how professional news organizations gather information today. Those posts were “kicking their ass when it came to breaking news,” says Brant Houston, Knight Chair for Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois. “It dawned on everybody that you can’t compete with people putting stuff up on social media.”5 Christina Zdanowicz, senior producer for CNN’s Social Discovery team, says her network was a “pioneer in citizen journalism” when it launched iReport in 2006 to capitalize on the increasing number of videos, photos and audio recordings by non-journalists at important news events. One early example: Video shot by a student captured sounds and scenes of the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech. Zdanowicz says she and her colleagues now monitor social media throughout the day to see what’s trending, and they chase the news almost immediately when something is posted.6 Such citizen accounts are not new. They were the lifeblood of the early days of American journalism, albeit created with different tools. Today we use smartphones, social media and other digital tools instead of the tracts, pamphlets and fliers used by the colonists. It’s likely that the initial Soviet cover-up of the Chernobyl accident would fall apart even faster today, thanks to social media and the digital world’s interconnectedness and accessibility. Stories and images today come at us all the time and from everywhere. Zdanowicz says CNN’s Social Discovery team works in an office but makes calls all over the world to collect images, sounds and eyewitness accounts of national and international events, from earthquakes and mass shootings to an airline dragging a passenger off an overbooked flight.

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ESSENTIAL VALUES OF SEEKING AND REPORTING TRUTH If anyone can post photos or tweet about such dramatic events as revolutions, earthquakes and police shootings, why would someone spend time learning to become a professional journalist? Grassroots journalism is vital and cannot be underestimated. But it cannot always meet the needs of societies – democratic and nondemocratic alike. Citizens do not usually have the commitment and training of professionals, and they may not always bring strong journalistic methods and standards such as fact checking, fairness and independence to their efforts. This book is about those essential values and practices that have consistently guided the work of the best professional journalists over the years. These standards are still relevant at this critical time for journalism, and for you. The best journalists know that the truth they present is often provisional and that their work may never present a complete picture, even when they do their job well. But they know that they come closest when they adhere to time-honored standards. Some values are obvious. Accuracy, curiosity and skepticism are cornerstones for the discipline of journalism. Other values may not be as apparent. You need to learn to ask good questions and get close to the stories you report; to pay close attention to details that other observers might miss; to prepare yourself for the unexpected; and to act as a watchdog who can monitor the powerful and give voice to those without influence. Knowing and understanding the places you write about is essential. But you should also keep up with what’s going on around the world, in Syria and Venezuela, in Myanmar and the Congo. Be ambitious and take some chances, but learn from the inevitable setbacks that can occur when you take a risk. Take advantage of the new tools that help you do your job faster and more efficiently, but always keep in mind that technology should be a means to an end and not the end itself. Strive to remember the humanity of the people you write about – people and their stories are what reporting is all about, Pulitzer-Prizewinning reporter Douglas Pardue says7 – and remember your own humanity as well. And it’s important that you understand why and how you must protect your integrity. Integrity is really all you have as a journalist. If you compromise it, you can lose everything. Some of these values may sound theoretical. But journalism is not theoretical, and you must put these values into practice every day

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and in every story you touch. They have guided the careers of many outstanding journalists whose work you’ll read about in these pages. Though you may not recognize all their names, all of them were committed to getting the news out honorably and professionally. They took their work to heart and tried to make the world a better place. Most of them would tell you their work was important and fun. If you’re lucky – and if you’re good – you’ll be able to say the same thing.

ESSENTIAL PRACTICES Getting information out to people quickly is what journalists have always done. But there’s more to journalism than writing, reporting and taking pictures, blogging and tweeting. Journalism is the only occupation specifically protected by the U.S. Constitution; it isn’t licensed or regulated like medicine or the law, but it does carry a similar sense of responsibility and obligation to a greater good, and that sets it apart from a simple trade. It requires a professional commitment to values and practices that may sound corny, but which have stood the test of time. The best journalists: •• Believe their job is to seek out truth as nearly as it can be ascertained, and then to report it accurately and fairly. •• Know that journalistic truths are often provisional. The truth they discover today may change tomorrow, and they must constantly reassess what they have learned. •• Ask why and how something happened, and then listen carefully to the answers. •• Consider themselves professional skeptics, always looking for proof and seeking verification for what they have been told. •• Guard against cynicism. A skeptic seeks answers; a cynic thinks he already has them. •• Recognize that complicated stories demand balance, but that the best journalism goes beyond simple “he said, she said” coverage. •• Prepare for the unexpected, because they know from experience that plans will often go haywire and that they must be flexible and adaptable. A basic definition of news is, after all, something that isn’t anticipated or expected. •• Know they have done their job well when they find and tell stories about particular people, places and events that have universal meanings.

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•• Know that unread or unwatched stories serve no purpose, so they are always looking for new ways to intelligently engage and inform an audience. The story is what matters; the form used to tell it may – no, will – change. •• Understand that their stories can do good as well as harm. They weigh the consequences and try to choose their words and images carefully, while remaining faithful to the facts. •• Aspire to tell stories that uncover injustice, right wrongs and help people make their lives better. They look out for ordinary folks whose voices are seldom heard, and they keep a watchful eye on those in power and expose their abuses. Journalism is sometimes seen as a profession where speed is valued above all else. The best journalists do value speed, but accuracy is sacred. Details matter and the facts must be right. They acknowledge and correct their mistakes. They also do their best to call out any journalist who dishonors the profession through carelessness or such willful acts as lying, plagiarizing or making things up. The best journalists may not always be comfortable talking about it, but they also understand that what they do has a meaning bigger than individual writers and photojournalists or their stories and their images. American journalists value the privileges afforded by our democracy and desire to give something in return. Whether or not they have read the work of scholar James Carey, they are likely to believe as he did, that journalism is the conversation of democracy, and that one cannot exist without the other.8 They know that a free society cannot survive if its people are not well informed. Whether they are freelancers or staff members of large organizations, the best journalists are loyal to citizens. They realize, too, that their profession has, since Colonial days, been subject to attack from politicians and others who may disagree with how a story is presented or the conclusions that are reached. The best reporters know that if they’ve got their facts right, the attacks won’t matter.

 TIPS FROM YOUNGER JOURNALISTS: WHEN YOU’RE STARTING OUT Do all the little things when you’re new. Young reporters should be willing to work odd shifts, late nights. Make yourself indispensable. Pitch in and contribute and build trust with your editors, and you’ll get freedom to pursue other things. Marie Wilson, senior writer, Daily Herald, Arlington Heights, Ill

YOU’VE GOT TO BE A LITTLE CRAZY

There might be a tendency to act like you don’t need help when you’re new. That’s not right. I’ve never met a reporter or editor who wasn’t willing to help. But you’ve got to ask for it. You can’t just sit at your desk. Katie Foody, Associated Press reporter, Denver Say yes to new opportunities even if they don’t go down the path you imagined. Dan Petrella, state government reporter, Chicago Tribune Do whatever you can to develop your own ideas. You’ll get assignments. But developing your own ideas, that’s what matters. Janelle O’Dea, data reporter, St. Louis Post-Dispatch On working as a reporter for the college newspaper: Interviews made me anxious. I don’t know if it’s good advice to tell student they have to do reporting. For me personally, you don’t have to be a reporter to be in news. Tyler Davis, data editor, The Chronicle of Higher Education Coming out of school you think you’re on top of the world. But the job market can be excruciatingly difficult at times. It’s not going to be easy. Nothing is going to fall into your lap. Work hard. Take on complex subjects. Cover something you don’t know anything about. Learn everything you can about the different subjects. Be open to working in different locations and to different career paths. Be flexible. Your career is going to be all over the place. Declan Harty, reporter, S&P Global Market Intelligence On taking a new beat: Read as much as you can about it. Steve Contorno, political editor, Tampa Bay Times9

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ESSENTIAL PASSION FOR JOURNALISM News organizations have been in crisis for most of this century, which means journalism and, by extension, democracy are in crisis as well. From 2008 to 2015 newsroom jobs in the U.S. dropped by 23 percent – from 114,000 to about 88,000. The decline was largely driven by loss of newspaper jobs – from 71,000 in 2008 to 39,000 in 2017.10 Entrepreneurs have tried to fill in some of the gaps that have been created. ProPublica, a non-profit investigative news organization, was founded in 2007–2008 and has established itself as a major player: It has four Pulitzer Prizes among its many awards (www.propublica. org). The Institute for Nonprofit News (inn.org) counts more than 200 nonprofit news operations in its membership, including MinnPost, Rocky Mountain PBS, Wisconsin Center for Investigative Reporting, and Voice of San Diego – all members since 2009 – and newer members such as Block Club Chicago, the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, High Country News and the Marshall Project. Still, many small and medium-sized communities have seen their local news sources severely reduced and, in too many cases, eliminated. It is not clear who will produce quality journalism, particularly at the local level, and who will pay for it if current models collapse. Despite the gloom, the passion for journalism still lives in many of its practitioners – young and old. Dan Rather spent 44 years as a reporter and anchor for CBS News. Now in his 80s, he says the business was easier when he was younger, but he’s still at it. To do journalism anywhere close to well, you have to burn with a hot, hard flame. You have to have a passion – a passion that borders on an obsession. You have to be prepared to have it almost consume your life.11 Stephanie Lulay is in her early 30s; she’s managing editor and cofounder of Block Club Chicago, which is committed to ground-level reporting of that city’s neighborhoods. She’s seen a lot of friends and colleagues leave journalism, either by choice or because of layoffs or shutdowns. But she and her cohorts at Block Club have stuck with journalism because of a “burning passion” to tell stories that need to be told about their community and because good journalism is “more important to our democracy now than ever.” “It’s not like I’m so brave” to stay in journalism, she says. “The people who stay in this, we’re the crazy ones . . . It’s not like I’m noble. I’m nuts.”12

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For journalism to survive we need journalists who understand its importance to society, who believe in and are committed to its core values, and who can put those values into action. We need journalists who see their jobs as more than just a way to earn a paycheck, no matter the format, structure or medium of their organization. We need journalists like Dan Rather, like Stephanie Lulay, who see their work as a mission, a calling. We need journalists who believe they can make a difference when they answer that call, who believe that they can help make things better for the people they write about and the people they write for. Most importantly, we need committed journalists like you to put these values into practice to produce the kind of work that will inform and enrich society in the coming decades.

ABOUT THIS BOOK This book includes tips, assignments and suggested readings and other resources to help you develop strong values and good practices that will make you a better journalist. This is not a traditional textbook that shows you how to organize, structure and write stories. There are many fine books you can turn to for that purpose. Nor is this book meant to be an examination or critique of media; it’s about the distinct roles and responsibilities that set journalism apart from other media. This book is not intended to be an elegy for newspapers, either. The traditional journalistic values of newspapers remain essential today; in fact, they may be needed now more than ever. But journalism has always been about more than ink and paper. The values and practices discussed in this book apply to all forms of journalism – traditional print and broadcast as well as digital formats and formats that have yet to be conceived. Some of the values and attitudes may seem oldfashioned to you, but that doesn’t mean they are outdated. They continue to apply to a journalism that is alive and essential today, and they are what journalism needs to remain vital and important to American society, and to the world. For all the problems journalism faces today, for all the excesses and mistakes that have been committed by its practitioners over the years, societies continue to depend on journalists to tell them what’s important and what’s interesting. Events happen fast in the world, and not all journalists take the time to explain what they mean. Committed journalists help their fellow citizens make sense of what’s going on.

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The work is not easy, it is often thankless, and it can be risky. But it must be done, and done well. This book will help you develop values and practices that will guide you in your professional career.

CONCLUSION Why did Igor Kostin keep returning to Chernobyl? He explained The whole world was talking about the catastrophe and something had to be found out about it. What was I supposed to do—stay in Kiev, write a satire, drink coffee, and do nothing? How could I have? It was my job to go there, and I did my job. Kostin died in 2015 in a car accident on the outskirts of Kiev; he was 78. This book is dedicated to journalists like him, past and present, who hurried to the scene and did their job thoughtfully and carefully, sometimes at great personal risk. Learn from their good work, and set a good example for the generation of journalists who follow you.

 ASSIGNMENTS 1. As a student you probably have thought about what you want to do as a journalist. You might not have given as much thought to why you want to be one. Now is a time to do that. List reasons why you want to become a journalist. Think in broad terms about the constitutional rights and protections that journalists have in this country, as well as the responsibilities and obligations that come with those rights. Consider, too, how public attitudes about journalism have evolved in today’s highly polarized political environment. What are some of the challenges that journalists now face? 2. Think also about the important stories that journalists have reported over the years and what those stories have meant to the public. How would you want your work to be remembered at the end of your career? Save your list and add ideas to it as you read further. 3. Discuss your reasons with classmates or other journalists you know. Are their reasons similar? Talk about what you have in common and where you diverge.

YOU’VE GOT TO BE A LITTLE CRAZY

11

  OTHER RESOURCES Tim Russert was a lawyer and television journalist and the moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press for 16 years. Colleagues, competitors and his interview subjects respected him for his professionalism, his passion for journalism and his human touch. He died of a heart attack in June 2008 while he was prepping for an upcoming program; he was 58. Ten years after his death, two producers who worked with him for years on Meet the Press wrote about the lessons they thought college journalism students could learn from him. Here’s what they had to say: www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/ tim-russert-loss-lessons-decade-later-n882611. The nonprofit Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., has provided training and other resources for journalists and journalism educators since 1975. In early 2019, it looked at the past decade of American journalism, interviewing 15 journalists from around the country about their experiences. “Did we just experience the hardest decade in journalism?” by Kristen Hare explores the challenges of the past and opportunities of the future. You can read it at: www.poynter.org/ journalisms-hardest-decade.

NOTES 1 Information and quotes in this chapter about Igor Kostin’s experiences at Chernobyl come from his book Chernobyl: Confessions of a Reporter (Umbrage Editions, 2006) and from an interview with Kostin in Eurozine (April 2006), www.eurozine.com/the-vodka-was-supposed-to-cleanse-ourthyroid-glands. 2 CNBC, “The Five-Year Anniversary of Twitter’s Defining Moment,” January 16, 2014. 3 NPR, “Anonymous Videographers Among Winners of 2009 George Polk Awards,” February 15, 2010. 4 Amy Mitchell, Heather Brown and Emily Guskin, “The Role of Social Media in the Arab Uprisings,” November 28, 2012, Pew Research Center Journalism & Media. 5 Interview with Brant Houston, August 23, 2018. 6 Interview with Christina Zdanowicz, July 20, 2018. 7 Interview with Douglas Pardue, July 13, 2018. 8 James Carey, “A Republic If You Can Keep It,” in James Carey: A Critical Reader, eds Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 207–227. 9 Interviews with Marie Wilson, June 12, 2018; Katie Foody, June 16, 2018; Dan Petrella, July 22, 2018; Janelle O’Dea, June 30, 2018; Tyler Davis, June 17, 2018; Declan Harty, July 2, 2018; Steve Contorno, June 21, 2018.

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10 Pew Research Center, “Newsroom Employment Dropped Nearly a Quarter in Less Than 10 Years, With Greatest Decline at Newspapers,” July 30, 2018, pewresearch.org. 11 Steven Petrow, “Now 86, Dan Rather is Big on Facebook,” The Washington Post, November 14, 2017. 12 Interview with Stephanie Lulay, June 29, 2018.

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Stay Curious

By some standards, Roanoke, Virginia, appeared racially moderate. African-Americans made up more than 20 percent of the population. They held elected seats on the city council and appointed positions on the school board. The school superintendent and the police chief were black. For almost two decades, the city’s popular mayor had been a black Republican. Yet racial tensions persisted, even as the 20th century drew to an end. The city was widely reported to be one of the most segregated in the country. Black citizens routinely voiced a distrust of city government, police, courts and schools. The distrust was also directed toward the local newspaper, The Roanoke Times, which didn’t hire its first black reporter until 1973. For decades it ignored almost everything that happened in black neighborhoods, except crime. Reporter Mary Bishop was curious. What was the root cause of the African-American community’s suspicion, she wondered, and why was it so deep? Bishop had been a member of The Philadelphia Inquirer team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for coverage of the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. A disciple of legendary editor Gene Roberts, Bishop could have remained at the big-city Inquirer, but instead she returned to her native Virginia and joined the Times. In 1989 she was a Pulitzer finalist for an investigative series about how Virginia’s failure to regulate its pest control industry led to major consumer fraud, illness and even death for some homeowners. The next year, she was a Pulitzer finalist again as a member of a team that covered a yearlong strike by coal miners. The class and racial issues that separated Roanoke’s white and black communities fascinated Bishop, and she began to write stories about

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what created the tensions. She developed contacts, then sources, then relationships with black citizens, many of whom had never talked to a reporter, much less a white one like Bishop. She took a keen interest in Gainsboro, a predominantly black neighborhood that was once part of a larger, more cohesive AfricanAmerican community. In the 1950s, though, the other black neighborhoods were wiped out by urban renewal, a post-World War II movement that swept away the parts of the nation’s cities that were considered blighted slums. As in other cities, the communities most affected in Roanoke were predominantly black. For many residents, urban renewal was a euphemism for “Negro removal.” White government officials and city leaders in Roanoke – as well as journalists who covered the story and wrote editorials – considered urban renewal a progressive way to clear slums and open up land for highways, industries and other civic institutions. Hearings were held and votes cast. Homes and businesses were torn down and families were forced to move, many into newly constructed public housing complexes. The Roanoke Times covered the hearings and informed readers about how their tax dollars were spent. The newspaper celebrated groundbreakings for roads, businesses and a new civic center. But it did not write about the people who were forced out of their homes and neighborhoods or acknowledge in any fashion what those citizens lost. Like many newspapers of the time, its reporters covered issues from the perspective of those in power, namely from a narrow, white perspective. The paper’s coverage of urban renewal missed the most human and heartbreaking part of the story. Mary Bishop’s curiosity changed that. For nearly three years, Bishop worked on the Gainsboro story while juggling day-to-day reporting responsibilities. Using city directories from the 1940s and 1950s, she identified virtually every home and business seized under urban renewal, and she tracked down individuals who had lived or worked in those places. She documented what happened to neighborhoods and institutions that no longer existed, digging deep to reveal the effects on people whose lives had been altered forever. Her story was an account of Roanoke life that did not exist in history books, newspaper archives or in any official record. The facts were staggering. In predominantly black northeast Roanoke, 980 homes, 14 churches, two schools and 64 businesses were razed. The city burned more than 100 homes because that was the cheapest way to get rid of them.

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“It was like looking at a war movie,” the Rev. Ivory Morton, who grew up during the urban renewal years, told Bishop. Charles Meadows recounted how he worked for the railroad and bought a home where he and his wife raised five children. When the city forced him out, it paid him $7,800 and gave him another $2,500 to help with the move. By 1995, his old property was owned by the gas company and was part of a tract assessed at $2 million. Bishop’s persistence drew praise from white readers who were astonished at the history lesson – and from black readers grateful that this part of their history had finally been told.1

What made Bishop a good reporter? No doubt it was a blend of talent, discipline and sound training from the Columbia School of Journalism, plus years of experience. But another key to her success was revealed by a quote she kept posted beside her desk. The words were Albert Einstein’s: “Never lose a holy curiosity.”2 Bishop talked about the world with surprise and delight, and she encouraged her colleagues to regard their beats and the world around them with the same awe and questioning attitude with which Einstein viewed the universe. Go deeper, go higher, go farther, Bishop implored those around her. Look beneath the surface; look beyond the horizon. See what’s there. Give yourself license to wonder. The best journalists like Bishop possess an insatiable curiosity about what’s going on in the world. They know people are complex and that their stories can be complicated. They know that while facts can sometimes be easy to come by, the truth is more difficult to find. Ask yourself these questions: •• Do you seek answers to questions that others don’t even think of asking? •• Are you willing to keep looking for facts and details when others might give up? •• Does what you don’t know nag at you? How dedicated are you to asking why and how to fill in those gaps? •• How curious are you? The answers to many of your questions will not be found on the surface, through quick interviews or perfunctory examinations of records or documents. They won’t be found through cursory Internet searches, either. Instead, you will have to dig deep to find the facts

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and details that will make your stories come alive. But the more you dig for answers, the better journalist you will become.

CURIOSITY IS ESSENTIAL Ask yourself one more question: Why would you want to be a journalist if you’re not curious about the world? Curiosity is a defining trait – maybe the defining trait – of good journalists. Bishop says if you don’t have it, you probably should find another profession. For the best reporters, curiosity is innate, says Ron Nixon, the international investigations editor for the Associated Press. But too many journalists aren’t as curious as they should be. “They get things as they come along. They sit there with their net in the water and they hope a fish comes along instead of going out and looking in different places.”3 Mindy McAdams, University of Florida Journalism Professor and Knight Chair in Journalism Technologies and the Democratic Process, says curiosity is essential for journalists. It’s a great privilege to be paid for telling stories to the world. To earn that privilege, you’ve got to approach every opportunity to learn a new story with an open mind and a desire to find out something new. You’ll never tell a great story if your strategy is to fill in blanks on a form and then simply write it up.4 Nigel Jaquiss won the 2005 Pulitzer for investigative reporting at the Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon, for exposing a former governor’s long concealed sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old girl. Jaquiss said he loved getting to exercise his curiosity and learn things that no one else knows. “The rewards are inestimable. You get to go ask questions today. You get to go deep in the bowels of the library and look things up.”5 David Rosenthal was senior editor for investigations and enterprise at The Baltimore Sun when it won national awards for reporting about police brutality in the city and for its subsequent coverage of the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African-American who died after suffering spinal injuries in the back of a police van. Now managing editor of Side Effects Public Media, a health news initiative, he says the best reporters take advantage of the incredible license they have to go where they want – “short of walking into an operating room or a prison” – and ask anybody about anything.6

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Leon Dash, a Pulitzer Prize winner at The Washington Post, says his “insatiable curiosity” about people led him to in-depth explorations of such sensitive and emotional subjects as adolescent pregnancy and one family’s descent into poverty, crime and drug abuse. As an endowed journalism professor at the University of Illinois, he tries to make his students see how important it is to go beyond basic journalism practices to find out things they never suspected or imagined. Dash politely calls these discoveries “epiphanies.” In newsrooms, they are described as “holy shit” moments in which someone uncovers something completely unanticipated.7

NURTURING CURIOSITY You can develop methods to nurture your curiosity. For Mary Bishop, curiosity means letting her imagination run wild, wondering about people, places and things. Bishop credited Gene Roberts for inspiring his journalists to follow their curiosity wherever it led them. Roberts gave reporters and editors at the Philadelphia Inquirer license to chase down the answers they needed; they felt entitled, Bishop says, to “find out anything they wanted to know.” For Roberts, curiosity and the willingness to dig for answers were the foundation for the most important kind of journalism. The finest reporting, he said, always “digs, and digs, and digs. And the finest writing . . . puts things so vividly, so compellingly, that readers can see and understand and comprehend.”8 Bishop was not afraid to dig deep or tackle a complex subject. The more complicated the subject, the more her adrenaline flowed. And the more her curiosity kicked into overdrive, the harder she worked. Sometimes Bishop was curious about what was happening at a particular moment, but often she was curious about events in the past, why they had taken place and what they meant for the present. The only way to uncover the meaning from the past was to keep digging like a good archaeologist. “Why is it this way?” she asked herself about Roanoke’s racial history. “Why did they set up the town this way? And then it’s imagining yourself in another person’s shoes, thinking about what their point of view is, how they grew up.” A lack of curiosity can drain a story of its vitality. Think about a story you’ve recently completed, and then answer these questions as honestly as possible:

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•• Were you genuinely interested in the person or the issue you were writing about? •• Did you approach the story with an open but inquisitive attitude, or did you accept what you were told without question? •• Are there things you wish now you had asked about or had challenged? •• Did questions occur to you afterward that you should have answered in your initial reporting? Most likely you could have asked more questions, but you got a quote and were ready to move on. Curiosity means keeping your mind and your eyes open and being willing to ask another round of why or how questions. Now that you’ve evaluated your last story, here are some ways to foster your curiosity for the next one.

GO DOWN A RABBIT HOLE Dan Barry, who wrote the “This Land” column for The New York Times for more than a decade, made notes about things that aroused his curiosity: Where are the Munchkins today? Who gets to be judge at a county fair baking contest, and does the power go to the judges’ head? What are the auditions like for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Who are the Odd Fellows? Sometimes, Barry said, those questions led to weightier issues. What is it like to witness an execution? What do you do when the Mississippi River threatens to flood your town? Who are the boxers who travel around the South, getting their brains beat in for a couple of hundred bucks?9 Other times, though, he says it meant by chance finding an old photograph, tucked between the pages of an old book, of a young girl in a white dress posing beside a small black dog, and wondering, whatever happened to you? And then finding notes written in pencil on the back of the picture: Merlyn Della Davis Born June 9, 1934 Picture taken May 30, 1935

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“And down another rabbit hole I went,” Barry wrote. That’s how he discovered who the little girl was and what her life had been like in the 80-plus years since the picture had been taken. And that the dog’s name – always get the dog’s name! – was Skippy.10

ASK WHY AND HOW The best journalists – the ones who are most curious about the world – understand how difficult it is to dig for answers to complex questions and to write honestly and deeply about what’s going on around them. As a young journalist, it will be hard for you too, but you must never stop digging. Covering the who, what, when and where of an event is important, but in many cases it’s important to go beyond those questions and explain why and how and to look for the reasons things are the way they are. A why question led journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe to write The Right Stuff, his epic account of America’s first astronauts. Why, he wondered, would a man be willing “to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan, or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?”11 Why is always the best question, Washington Post reporter Joel Achenbach says. “This is not to insult those who handle what, where, when or who, nor even the masters of how,” Achenbach writes in Why Things Are, a collection of his columns of the same name. But those questions are too often answered through pure description, the mere delivery of information, the recitation of facts, trivia, minutiae. When you ask why, you are shooting much higher . . . What makes ‘why’ such a special question is that it is entirely human. ‘Why’ does not occur naturally in the universe. The universe just IS, from all appearances . . . But if there were no people like us, there would be no asking why these things are.12 (Admittedly, Achenbach’s columns were not all about serious stuff. Among other things, he explained why ants are so strong, why foreign languages sound so fast, and why it’s impossible to tickle yourself.) The more experienced you become, the more naturally you will remember to ask how and why. In the meantime you may want to

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write those questions at the top of every page of your reporter’s notebook to remind you of their importance. Dig for those answers, and you will be rewarded.

LISTEN TO MOM Emily Siner, news director of Nashville Public Radio, says she’s naturally curious about why people do what they do and how their experiences shape their beliefs. But she recalls stories where she had to interview people whose positions on issues might have been controversial or inflammatory. She wondered what would be the best way to approach them. So she called her Mom for advice. “Don’t go into it as a confrontation,” said her mom, who’s not a journalist. “You’re trying to understand why they have certain beliefs or opinions. You’re there to learn, not to be confrontational, not to be accusatory.” That advice changed the demeanor of Siner’s questions. It’s human nature to jump to judgments and, as a journalist, thinking about ulterior motives is part of the job. But you can get to the real story if you start from a place of natural curiosity. Curiosity is an antidote to cynicism, Siner says. You may think one thing, but there might be another explanation, something you don’t see. And it’s not letting people off the hook for their actions or their beliefs, she says. It’s simply trying to understand why something is the way it is.13 Unfortunately, journalists today work in newsroom environments that cannot always provide the time or the incentives necessary to fully satisfy our curiosity about what’s going on around us. News is 24/7, and the emphasis is on getting the news out fast. Then we move on to the next breaking news event, and we strive again to be the first to tell our readers and viewers what happened. Like every journalist, you will experience the excitement of a breaking story and the thrill that comes with being the first to tell it, accurately. (Part of the definition of news is, after all, that it is new.) But you need to be more than a stenographer who records what happens or a transcriber who merely writes down what people say. Build and maintain a passionate curiosity to drive your journalistic ventures. Explore the questions that arise and don’t be satisfied with scratching the surface. “Never lose a holy curiosity.” Einstein’s words deserve a place on bulletin boards in every newsroom in the country. Put them above your desk, put them in your notes, and live by them.

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CONCLUSION Mary Bishop received a lot of recognition during her career, but journalism for her was not about awards or personal honor. It was about integrity, compassion for others and her passionate belief that good journalism can make a difference. She knew that the most important stories were about people, and she was unflinchingly honest in telling those stories, about the rich and the powerful, but especially about the poor and the weak. She remains proud of investigating the effect of urban renewal on Roanoke’s black community. It was a story that had been around for more than 40 years, and yet no one had done the digging to uncover it. “It was a chance to tell a story that no one had told. It happened under everyone’s watch, so slowly. No one thought about it because the people were so devalued.” Bishop retired from daily journalism, but she’s still a working journalist, still filled with holy curiosity. Most recently, that led her to tell the story of her family’s past, and her discovery, when she was 32, that she had a half-brother, a secret sibling that her mother had never told her about. How, Bishop wondered, could she reconcile the loving mother she knew with a woman who could not acknowledge the son, even warning him: “Don’t you ever call me Mama”? And how and why had her brother’s life turned out so sad when hers had gone so well? She answers those questions and others in a memoir, Don’t You Ever (Harper, 2018). The truth she discovered – after years of digging into her family’s history, and as difficult as it was to uncover and to face – helped her understand her mother and her brother. “I believe in truth,” Bishop said. “I think truth is redemptive.”14

 CHECKLIST •• Keep a journal. Take notes about what you see, hear and experience, and not just for the stories you’re reporting. What doesn’t add up or make sense? What insights and questions do you take away from your daily experiences? •• Talk to people and listen to what they tell you. Be curious, even politely nosy. Why did someone do something a particular way? What were her motivations? What are the things she says that are surprising, even astonishing? Record what you learn. •• Read. Everything. Fiction, non-fiction, magazines, newspapers, websites. Even poetry. Don’t read only what you agree with or material that covers topics that you’re already interested in.

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Investigate diverse subjects you’ve never studied. Record your thoughts and observations. •• Keep learning. You’re probably looking forward to the day you finally graduate from college. But don’t stop learning when you do. A lot of what you will need to know in your work must be learned on your own time. Look for opportunities to discover new things about art or literature, learn a new language, or take up a new sport. •• Be open-minded. Journalists often think they already know what the story is about. You may be dead certain, but you could still be dead wrong. Don’t stop questioning. Keep wondering.

 ASSIGNMENTS 1. Remember as a child always asking your parents, What’s that? and Why? This natural curiosity may have been so extreme that perhaps your parents or teachers politely told you to be quiet. You probably didn’t stay quiet for long. You had to tell someone what you had learned or discovered. Try to approach your next story with the curiosity and naïveté of a child. Even if you’ve covered the subject before, put aside your assumptions and approach it anew. Draw up a list of as many basic questions you can think of, and use them to go after the story: • • • • • • •

What’s that? Why are things this way? Why aren’t things different? Who’s responsible? What’s going to happen next? Where else can I go for information? Who should I talk to next?

2. When you’ve finished your reporting, study what you’ve learned. What epiphanies have you had? What surprises have you uncovered? What have you discovered that you – and maybe no one else – knew or imagined? 3. Finally, analyze your approach to the story. What have you learned about your own sense of curiosity? What will you do differently next time?

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  OTHER RESOURCES Journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about the importance of curiosity and asking questions that have no answers in this video for The Atlantic: www.theatlantic.com/video/index/516453/ ta-nehisi-coates-asking-questions-that-have-no-answers/?utm_sou rce=All+Poynter+Subscribers&utm_campaign=95f016a208EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_02_14&utm_medium=email&utm_ term=0_5372046825-95f016a208-257895901. Curiosita – Italian for curiosity – is an important subject of How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci by Michael J. Gelb (Delta Books, 2004). The chapter by that name gives advice about how to develop your sense of curiosity even more deeply. Joel Achenbach’s columns are collected in Why Things Are, Vols I and II. Nearly 100 of Dan Barry’s columns are collected in This Land: America, Lost and Found (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2018).

NOTES 1 Interview with Mary Bishop, August 31, 2008, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. “Street by Street, Block by Block: How Urban Renewal Uprooted Black Roanoke,” The Roanoke Times, January 28, 1995. 2 Albert Einstein to William Miller, quoted in Life magazine, May 2, 1955. Einstein’s complete quote is: “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.” 3 Interview with Ron Nixon, December 30, 2008, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition; and July 7, 2018. 4 Mindy McAdams, Teaching Online Journalism blog post, September 25, 2007: https://mindymcadams.com/tojou/2007/advice-for-journalism-students. 5 Interview with Nigel Jaquiss, February 15, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. 6 Interview with David Rosenthal, June 22, 2018. 7 Interview with Leon Dash, January 27, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. 8 Gene Roberts, IRE Journal (winter 2008). Quotes from Roberts’s November 1987 speech as part of the Otis Chandler Lecture Series at the University of Southern California. 9 “Talk to the Newsroom: ‘This Land’ Columnist,” The New York Times, February 15, 2009. 10 “On Journalistic Curiosity: Down the Rabbit Hole With Dan Barry,” The New York Times, January 26, 2018.

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11 Tom Wolfe, introduction to The Right Stuff (Farrar, Straus, 1983). 12 Joel Achenbach, introduction to Why Things Are: Answers to Every Essential Question in Life (Ballantine Books, 1991). 13 Interview with Emily Siner, June 24, 2018. 14 Casey Fabris, “Longtime Journalist Reveals Mother’s Secret in ‘Don’t You Ever’,” The Roanoke Times, July 16, 2018.

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Get It Right

Penn State fired football coach Joe Paterno in November 2011, less than two weeks after he’d won his 409th game, the most of any major college football coach. One of Paterno’s former assistants had just been arrested and charged with 52 counts of sexually abusing young boys. In response, the university’s board of trustees fired Paterno and the school’s president for failing to notify authorities when, years earlier, they were told of an accusation against the assistant coach. Paterno was a legend. He’d been national coach of the year five times; his teams won two national championships and were undefeated and untied five times. The 2011 season marked his 46th as Penn State’s head coach. When his firing became public, thousands of students rioted, turning over a television van and throwing rocks at police. Police wearing riot gear responded with tear gas. Ardent Penn State fans voiced support for Paterno, saying he’d been treated unfairly. But two months after his firing, there was a new concern: The coach had been diagnosed with lung cancer. In an interview at his home with a Washington Post reporter, Paterno, in a wheelchair, maintained his innocence but said, “In hindsight, I wish I had done more.” It was clear that he was dying. The first report of Paterno’s death came around 8:45 p.m. on January 21, 2012. Onward State, a student-run website, tweeted that it had learned of his death from an e-mail that had been sent to Penn State football players. A local FM radio station picked up the report. Within minutes, the CBS Sports website, the Huffington Post, Deadspin and BreakingNews.com – an arm of MSNBC.com – all reported the coach’s death. Individual journalists began tweeting it as the news spread on social media.

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Only it wasn’t true: Paterno was still on his deathbed. When the Associated Press learned of the Onward State report, it checked with a family spokesman it had worked with for two and a half months. The Associated Press tweeted that Paterno was still alive, using the source’s name. When Paterno finally died – nearly 12 hours after the false report first circulated – the AP confirmed the fact through an email and a phone call with the family spokesman. Onward State reported Paterno’s death because two of its reporters said they confirmed that a university administrator e-mailed the news to the football team; one reporter said he talked to a player. But the e-mail was phony, and the reporter had not talked to anyone on the team.1 When the truth became clear, Onward State’s managing editor posted a letter online in which he accepted responsibility for the error and announced his resignation. “In this day and age, getting it first often conflicts with getting it right, but our intention was never to fall into that chasm,” he wrote. “All I can do now is promise that in the future, we will exercise caution, restraint, and humility.”2

Unfortunately, there are other examples where journalists got something first, but got it wrong: •• In January 2011, a gunman opened fire at a political gathering for U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona. It was a Saturday morning, and many national news organizations were not fully staffed. Relying on eyewitnesses and government sources, NPR, then CNN, Fox News and The New York Times reported that Giffords was dead. Six people were killed; Giffords was seriously wounded, but survived.3 •• In June 2012, CNN and Fox News reported that the U.S. Supreme Court had just struck down a key provision of the Affordable Care Act – a step that would have basically gutted Obamacare. Both stories were wrong. Other news organizations reported correctly that the court upheld the provision by a 5–4 vote. CNN apologized, saying it should have waited to report the court’s “full and complete opinion.” Fox News said only that it “reported the facts as they came in.”4 •• Twenty elementary students and six adults were killed when a gunman shot his way into a school in Connecticut in December 2012. The AP, CBS, CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times reported that the gunman’s mother taught at the school. She didn’t; her son had killed her in their home before going to

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the school. Other news organizations misidentified the gunman’s brother as the killer, some posting the wrong brother’s photo on news sites and social media.5 •• A Washington Post reporter tweeted a picture of a nearly empty arena before a December 2017 rally for President Trump in Florida. The president tweeted that it was a “phony photo,” taken before his supporters arrived, and that he really had a “packed house.” The reporter apologized and took the image down within 20 minutes, calling it a “bad tweet” on his personal account.6 Even good journalists will make mistakes. And the competitive pressure to be first with breaking news – on the air, on social media, on news sites – has only increased the chances of getting something wrong. Washington Post journalist and author Bob Woodward calls it “the impatience of the Internet – ‘give it to us immediately’” that drives social media and cable news in particular.7 In the rush to get the news out first, reporters and editors may rely on a single source who has only partial or second-hand information. Journalists may think they don’t have time to confirm what they’ve been told and to double-check the details they’ve been given. They’re in such a hurry that they may ignore signals that might indicate something is incomplete at best, or wrong at worst. The Society of Professional Journalists specifically addressed this danger when it updated its code of ethics in 2014, saying “neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy.”8 And there are times when you must say, “we don’t have this yet,” says Monica Davey, Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times. If something doesn’t feel right, she says, trust your gut. There’s almost always time to take a few more minutes to make one more call. “We’ve all seen the dangers of being first and wrong.”9 And that’s what people usually remember – not who was first and right. NPR and the AP learned lessons from the attack on Giffords in Tucson. Consequently, in reporting the Paterno story, AP associate managing editor Ted Anthony said the wire service had a plan to ensure that it didn’t report anything prematurely. That meant that everyone knew the “conditions for accuracy” that had to be met – who the sources were and how reliable they were, how to verify information, and what to leave out. “What we don’t say at the AP is just as important as what we do say,” Anthony said. “Our news product is not only the news we put out, but the judgment we apply to it.”10 In its coverage of the Connecticut school shooting, NPR tightened its procedures to emphasize accuracy over speed. Memos by

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editors during the ongoing coverage listed what was known and what was “unconfirmed and could not yet be reported.” Editors noted that social media could provide helpful leads, but that care had to be exercised when using those tools. “Share what you’re hearing, seeing and reporting,” NPR editors said. “Question sources and your online followers to validate information. Bring our followers into the newsroom and the news process. But also be thoughtful and cautious.”11 After yet another shooting – this one in 2017 at a church in Texas, in which 26 people were killed and 20 were wounded at a Sunday morning worship service – Christopher Mele, weekend editor for The New York Times breaking news team, wrote about the steps the team took after seeing the first tweet about the shooting. Some news outlets quickly reported numerous casualties, citing social media posts. The Times needed someone in authority – a police officer, a coroner, the sheriff – to confirm those reports. Social media and other unofficial sources, Mele wrote, are almost always wrong in breaking news situations, and they can “amplify the echo chamber of incorrect details.” Throughout the afternoon, Times reporters and editors were able to gather the details they needed from eyewitnesses and people with authority. Their goal, Mele said, “is always to first be right, and then be first.”12

EVERY STORY IS IMPORTANT Most mistakes made by journalists are not as spectacular as those discussed above. Instead, someone’s age is incorrect, or a name is misspelled. A film review lists the wrong theater for a new movie. A story about a restaurant opening misreports its hours of operation or its location. Taken individually, these errors may seem small. A 2008 Wall Street Journal correction noted that a review of a DVD release of a 1972 science fiction movie erred in saying that androids in the movie were played by dwarfs; in fact, they were played by bilateral amputees. A 2017 New York Times correction noted that it’s Willy, not Willie, Wonka. Journalists make a mistake, though, if they don’t take errors – any error – seriously.13 “If you don’t feel bad about your mistakes, your moral compass is off a bit,” says Tampa Bay Times political editor Steve Contorno, who worked a year and a half reporting for PolitiFact, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning fact-checking organization.14

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All of our mistakes hurt us. Journalists are judged first and foremost on their commitment to accuracy. If we don’t verify the details in our stories – even the tiniest ones – readers and viewers will notice, and they’ll begin to question everything we do. In fact, many Americans already have doubts about our accuracy and trustworthiness. Numerous surveys in recent years show that the public’s perception of the accuracy of news stories has continued to drop. A January 2018 Gallup-Knight Foundation survey found that more Americans had a negative (43 percent) than positive (33 percent) view of the news media. (A curious side note: 23 percent were neutral.)15 And, of course, one of the most vocal critics of the news media has been Donald J. Trump, who used “fake news” so often during his campaign and the first years of his presidency that the American Dialect Society chose the term as its 2017 Word of the Year.16 The Gallup-Knight poll found that most Americans considered “fake news” a threat to democracy, but their definition of the term varied. A majority was more likely to believe that “fake news” is false information portrayed as if it were true. However, four in ten Republicans considered negative – but accurate – news stories about a politician or political group to always be “fake news.” But accuracy is not a partisan or political issue. No story is too small for detailed accuracy. You should strive for the same standards of accuracy, fairness and honesty no matter what your story is about. Every story is important to someone, and all should be important to you because each story pursued accurately and fairly will enhance your credibility – and the credibility of journalism in general. And each story reported carelessly will undermine that credibility. Get it right. That’s journalism’s prime directive. It sounds simple. Yet getting things right is not always easy, and often it can’t be done quickly. The difficult aspect of your job is not the writing or the interviewing, as hard as those may be; the difficult but important part is making sure that everything is correct. Your passion for accuracy must be obsessive. Develop reporting habits that help you verify your stories and document their accuracy. Without a commitment to getting things right, nothing you do will matter.

DEVELOP SOURCES Having strong and mutually trusting relationships with sources is essential to accuracy. They can give you information and leads to documents

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and records that can provide authority for your stories. Get to know your sources before you need them. They need to get to know you, too, on a professional level and, to a certain extent, a personal level as well. Trust is established only over time. Your sources will come to trust you after you’ve developed a relationship with them and demonstrated your commitment to accuracy and fairness. Second-hand sources are not always reliable, so look for individuals with direct knowledge or experiences for your stories. You need to talk to people who know the facts, not those who think they know or who are guessing. If a source isn’t certain about what she’s telling you, ask whom you should talk to or where you can go to find the hard facts. Seek information that can be proved and verified. Cite your sources. Attribution builds authority. Be transparent and let your audience know where your information comes from. (Let them know, too, if there are gaps or remaining questions that you need to answer in follow-up stories.) Provide links to online documents, records and other web-based references so that readers can see the records for themselves. Avoid anonymous sources; readers and viewers generally distrust them. Use them only when the information they provide is essential to the story and you can find no on-the-record source. And always consult your editor before allowing someone to go unnamed in a story. Be careful with data, particularly if you don’t work with it often. It can be easy to misinterpret the data or jump to conclusions that are not supported. Find someone – inside or outside your newsroom – who is data-fluent to review the numbers and see if your interpretation makes sense.17 Also be careful with social media and any information you find on the Internet. You can use social media to find leads and sources, but you can’t always trust that someone else’s post is accurate. And just because something is on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s true. It’s your responsibility to verify your information. Don’t be lazy. Check back with your sources after the story runs. If you’re honest and direct with them beforehand, you have nothing to fear from their reaction afterward to a story that is accurate, fair and honest, even if it’s unfavorable or unflattering to the source. They may point you in a new direction for a follow-up or your next story. And if you got something wrong, you can learn from your mistake, and correct it. (We’ll talk about this in Chapter 4.)

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 TIPS FROM YOUNGER JOURNALISTS: BE DAMN SURE YOU’RE RIGHT If you make a mistake on something small, readers will doubt everything. That becomes ammunition that can be used against you. Take an extra five minutes to check your facts. Walk away. Come back. Read it again. Report only what you know for certain. Maria Ines Zamudio, immigration reporter, WBEZ Chicago Never trust yourself too much. If you still have questions, call back and say, “I don’t get it. Can you explain it to me again?” If you’re having trouble writing it, you probably don’t understand it. Katie Foody, Associated Press reporter, Denver If you’re going to say someone or something is wrong, you better be damn sure you’re right. – Steve Contorno, Tampa Bay Times political editor, about his experience working for PolitiFact, the prize-winning fact-checking news organization. Don’t just rely on the Internet. It’s difficult not to just be lazy. Make the call. Talk to an actual person. Being stressed for time is never a good excuse. Call people back: Hey, this is what I’ve found in my data analysis. Ask if it makes sense. Janelle O’Dea, data reporter, St. Louis Post-Dispatch If I still had a lingering question about something when I turned in a story, my editor would have the same question, too. Answer all your own questions. Dan Petrella, state government reporter, Chicago Tribune18

ANY ERROR IS EVERLASTING Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1970 for his stories about the massacre

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of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by American troops and the subsequent cover-up by the Army. Hersh’s book about the massacre was excerpted in two issues of The New Yorker. In his memoir Reporter, he recounts his experience with the young women who fact-checked his articles, line by line. The process, he said, taught him humility, “or what passes for humility for me.” He’d made many errors, most of them from his summary of material that had been published elsewhere. “I learned from the checkers that every detail – essential or otherwise – matters,” Hersh said.19 John McPhee, another Pulitzer winner, has written for The New Yorker since 1963, and material for many of his books appeared originally in the magazine. He, too, has high regard for the factcheckers who saved him and other writers from numerous mistakes. He described how Sara Lippincott, a retired New Yorker editor, explained the job to a journalism class: “Each word . . . that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker’s imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick.” Any error is everlasting, McPhee said. Once an error gets into print, Lippincott told the students, it lives “on and on in libraries carefully catalogued, scrupulously indexed . . . deceiving researcher and researcher down through the ages, all of whom will make new errors on the strength of the original errors.”20 Journalistic mistakes occur for many different reasons. A reporter doesn’t double-check the spelling of a name or a math calculation. A reporter misunderstands what a source means, or misinterprets data, documents or records. A source provides erroneous information, either intentionally or accidentally. An editor changes something in a story and makes it wrong. Or a reporter relies on old news accounts that contain errors that should have been caught, but weren’t. You will probably never have a New Yorker fact-checker who can scrutinize and verify each detail in your story. That means that, ultimately, you’re responsible for the accuracy of your work. Editors may catch some things, but many news organizations have reduced or eliminated on-site copy-editing positions. The person editing your story may be in a distant city or even another state; she may be able to correct your grammar, but she may not know – or have time to check – that your city’s mayor spells her last name K-E-L-L-E-Y, not K-E-L-L-Y. Verifying information takes time and discipline, especially in the digital realm. CNN’s Social Discovery team, for example, follows strict protocols when it sets out to verify viewer-submitted video and images. Senior Producer Christina Zdanowicz says the team looks at

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Google Street View or other images of a scene to make sure the video was really taken at the site in question, and they check to see if the video is consistent with confirmed videos and images from the area. They also consult regional experts, as Zdanowicz did during the Arab Spring, who can look at and listen to cues in the videos. Does what the experts hear and see match up with what they know about a particular country or region? What’s being said, and in what language? All those steps must be followed and all questions answered before the video can air.21 When it comes to accuracy, old-school methods still work, as Axios national political reporter Jonathan Swan told a reader who asked how his reporting methods compared with those of older peers: “The approach is the same: Check, check, double check, triple check. Make another phone call. Make another phone call. Be constantly petrified that you’re going to bring shame on yourself and your family.”22

BE CAREFUL TO THE VERY END When you’ve finished your draft, verify the facts in your story against your notes and other source materials. Use independent, authoritative sources. If you find a discrepancy, go back to your original sources and clear it up. Always ask yourself if your reporting supports what your story says. Be sure you can verify what you’ve written. Whenever possible, print out your story and read it carefully before you turn it in. You may be surprised at what you’ve missed on a screen. Verify your words and numbers. If something doesn’t feel right, check it out. Resolve what’s bothering you. If you have any doubts, leave it out. It’s better to omit a questionable detail than to report something that is wrong. Don’t fall into the trap of assuming you know what’s correct. Instead, ask yourself, was that exactly what he said? Then check your notes and your recorded interviews. If it isn’t exact, don’t use it as a direct quote. If you paraphrase, convey the meaning and the context accurately. What brand of beer was on the table when the shooting started? Details matter. Blue Moon is not the same as Blue Ribbon. Was she wearing a scarf or a shawl when she entered the room? Be precise. They are similar, but they’re not the same. Is President Trump’s counselor Kellyanne or Kelly Ann Conway? One is right; the other isn’t.

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Don’t underestimate the consequences of journalistic mistakes. If one story contains inaccuracies, readers may suspect that your other stories are wrong as well. If one reporter is careless, readers and viewers will come to believe that other journalists at the organization are just as sloppy. A reporter who makes mistakes tarnishes his own reputation as well as that of his colleagues, his organization and his profession. Many readers already believe the worst. Don’t give them more reasons to doubt journalism’s commitment to accuracy.

CONCLUSION Accuracy is what counts in journalism. Close isn’t good enough; almost right is still wrong. Being first doesn’t matter if you’re not right. Commit yourself to accuracy in everything you write, produce and edit. If you fail in that basic responsibility, you will lose, and the communities you serve will lose, too. So will your colleagues and your news organization. Journalism also loses because any mistake – small or large – undermines the credibility and trust the profession must have in a democracy.

 CHECKLIST •• Aim for what is provably true, not what is probably true. Your job is to verify the details in your story. Something may sound good, but don’t report it if you can’t confirm it. •• Double-check names and numbers. Ask interview subjects to spell their names, and then repeat the spelling for verification. Read back addresses and phone numbers. Call phone numbers to make sure they’re accurate if you include them in a story. Check URLS by typing them into your browser. •• Learn basic math. Learn how to calculate percentages. Understand the difference between mean and median. Don’t make your readers do the addition, subtraction, division or multiplication. Do it for them and then double-check your answers. •• Ask straight-forward questions. Be clear. Don’t be devious, back-handed or indirect. •• Don’t assume you know the answers to your questions. Listen – really listen – to what you’re told. Ask another question if you don’t understand or if something is not clear.

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•• Get a response. Especially if you’re dealing with derogatory information about someone. Make every effort to secure a comment. Making a phone call or sending an e-mail may not be enough. Go in person whenever possible. •• Develop sources with first-hand knowledge and find records and documents to support your reporting. You build authority when you can cite official documents and records. Then talk to sources who know facts and details. Name your sources. Don’t use pseudonyms. •• Do not rely on your memory, archives or other news stories. No matter how old you are, your memory can play tricks on you. And never assume that the details in someone else’s story are correct. •• Be careful with social media. Use it to find people, trends, ideas. But realize that you can’t always trust what others post. Verify first; if you have any doubts or suspicions, don’t use it. And be especially careful with what you post. Even the smallest mistake can quickly get blown up on social media or be seized on by people who will accuse you of carelessness or bias. •• Whenever possible, read a printed copy of your story carefully before you send it in. You’ll catch errors you missed on your screen. Read it aloud. If you stumble over passages, you probably need to rewrite. •• Listen to your gut. If something doesn’t sound or feel right, check it out. If you’re not certain it’s correct, leave it out. •• Check back with your sources after your story runs. They’ll appreciate it. Plus they’ll let you know what you got right and – more importantly – if you got something wrong.

 ASSIGNMENT Print out your next story and fact-check it like a New Yorker editor: 1. First, mark each fact in the story, including names, dates, addresses, numbers, direct quotes, information taken from documents, details that you may have seen or heard directly and details that have come from other human sources. 2. Line by line and word by word, verify each fact against your notes, documents and reference materials. Highlight in yellow any facts or details that do not match your notes or other source materials. 3. Double-check all the information that you could not verify and then get it right. Turn in the story only when you’re certain everything is correct.

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  OTHER RESOURCES The non-partisan nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journa‑ lism (www.wisconsinwatch.org) is one of the founding members of the Institute for Nonprofit News. Its guidelines for fact-checking were updated in 2012, and they can help you develop good habits for ensuring accuracy. You can get a PDF copy at https://inn.org/wp-content/ uploads/2014/12/WCIJ-CPI-Fact-Checking-Guidelines.pdf. After a 2013 shooting in Washington, D.C., WNYC’s On the Media produced a Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook to give tips for how, in the wake of a big, tragic story, a citizen can sort good information from bad. It’s designed for consumers, but it’s a good reference for journalists as well. Check it out: www.wnyc.org/story/ breaking-news-consumers-handbook-pdf.

NOTES 1 Details about the mistaken reports of Paterno’s death came in these accounts: Richard Goldstein, “Joe Paterno, Longtime Penn State Coach, Dies at 85,” The New York Times, January 22, 2012; Brian Stelter, “Mistaken Early Report on Paterno Roiled Web,” The New York Times, January 22, 2012; Paul Fahri, “Social Media Sets Off Firestorm of False Reports That Joe Paterno Died,” The Washington Post, January 22, 2012; Sally Jenkins, “Joe Paterno’s First Interview Since the Penn State-Sandusky Scandal,” The Washington Post, January 12, 2012; Craig Silverman, “3 Verification Lessons From the Joe Paterno Death Debacle,” poynter. org, January 25, 2012. 2 onwardstate.com, “An Apology from the Managing Editor of Onward State,” January 21, 2012. 3 Mallory Jean Tenore, “Conflicting Reports of Giffords’ Death were Understandable, But Not Excusable,” poynter.org, January 10, 2011. Other online news accounts are also accessible. 4 Brian Stelter, “CNN and Fox Trip Up in Rush to Get the News on the Air,” The New York Times, June 28, 2012. Other online news accounts are also accessible. 5 Peter Applebome and Brian Stelter, “Media Spotlight Seen as a Blessing, or a Curse, in a Grieving Town,” The New York Times, December 16, 2012; Paul Fahri, “Media Too Quick to Fill in the Gaps in Story of School Shooting in Newtown, Conn.,” The Washington Post, December 18, 2012. 6 Julia Manchester, “Washington Post Reporter Apologizes for Tweet on Crowd Size at Trump Rally,” The Hill, December 9, 2017. 7 Jim Rutenberg, “‘Bombshell’ Relegated to Limbo,” The New York Times, January 21, 2019. 8 www.spj.org/ethicscode-revision.asp. 9 Interview with Monica Davey, July 27, 2018.

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10 Craig Silverman, “How AP’s ‘Conditions for Accuracy’ Protected It from False Paterno, Giffords Death Reports,” poynter.org, January 23, 2012. 11 Edward Schumacher-Matos, “Getting It Right: Sandy Hook and The Giffords Legacy at NPR,” NPR.org, December 22, 2012. 12 Christopher Mele, “Breaking News of a Texas Church Shooting Required Accuracy and Sympathy,” The New York Times, November 10, 2017. 13 “Willy Wonka Correction,” The New York Times, December 1, 2017. Clipping for the Wall Street Journal correction, but no date. 14 Interview with Steve Contorno, June 21, 2018. 15 Gallup-Knight Foundation, American Views: Trust, Media and Demo‑ cracy, 2018. 16 American Dialect Society, “2017 Word of the Year is Fake News, as Voted by American Dialect Society,” January 5, 2018. 17 Interviews with Janelle O’Dea, June 30, 2018, and Tyler Davis, June 17, 2018. 18 Interviews with Maria Ines Zamudio, June 16, 2018; Katie Foody, June 16, 2018; Steve Contorno, June 21, 2018; Janelle O’Dea, June 30, 2018; Dan Petrella, July 22, 2018. 19 Seymour Hersh, Reporter (Knopf, 2018), pp. 147–148. 20 John McPhee, “Checkpoints: Fact-Checkers Do It a Tick At a Time,” The New Yorker, February 9, 2009. 21 Christina Zdanowicz interview, July 20, 2018. 22 Jonathan Swan, “Ask Me Anything,” on Reddit, September 18, 2018.

4

Admit Your Mistakes – And Learn From Them

“A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA” was a 9,000-word story in Rolling Stone in which a University of Virginia student – identified as “Jackie” – described being raped by seven male students in an upstairs bedroom of a campus fraternity house. Jackie told how her date – a lifeguard she met at the university aquatic center – coached the men who, one by one, assaulted her. Jackie also recounted in unflattering terms how some university administrators – as well as three friends, identified by first-name pseudonyms only – responded to what she said happened to her. The story was published on November 19, 2014, and quickly drew national attention. The online version attracted 2.7 million views, more than any other Rolling Stone story that was not about a celebrity. The story also quickly began to fall apart. Other news organizations noted that most of the story was based on a single source – “Jackie” – and questioned the plausibility of the account, which lacked on-the-record and named sources. The story’s author, freelancer Sabrina Rubin Erdely, had written for Rolling Stone since 2008 and had been published in other national and regional magazines. She began to have doubts herself after a couple of post-publication phone calls with Jackie raised questions. Erdely called her editor to say she’d lost confidence in the accuracy of Jackie’s account. The magazine posted a lengthy “Note to Readers” on December 5 that said that there were apparent “discrepancies” in Jackie’s story and that the magazine had made mistakes in its reporting and editing. That same day, The Washington Post published a 3,100word story with multiple on-the-record sources who contradicted and

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disputed details that Jackie provided, raising questions about whether she had, in fact, been assaulted. Rolling Stone and Erdely wanted to produce an in-depth investigation of how American colleges and universities dealt with sexual violence against women, and whether legal systems and campus cultures protected female students or left them still vulnerable to sexual assaults. But those goals were overshadowed when the journalistic flaws in “A Rape on Campus” became apparent. Rolling Stone asked Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism to independently investigate what went wrong. Columbia’s report, released in April 2015, was a scathing account of numerous missteps that led to a story so seriously flawed that some national victims’ advocates feared it would set back efforts to improve accountability and services for rape and assault survivors. Rolling Stone’s mistakes, the report concluded, were avoidable. The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking. The magazine set aside or rationalized as unnecessary essential practices of reporting that, if pursued, would likely have led the magazine’s editors to reconsider publishing Jackie’s narrative so prominently, if at all. The published story glossed over the gaps in the magazine’s reporting by using pseudonyms and by failing to state where important information had come from.1

“A Rape on Campus” was one of the most sensational journalistic failures of recent years. But it resulted in an important post-mortem about how and why things went wrong. It also produced a valuable lesson for journalists about Rolling Stone’s reporting and editing mistakes. As you learned in the previous chapter, diligence can help prevent errors. A rigorous system of verification can help ensure that you haven’t been careless with any details. In Jonathan Swan’s words: “Check, check, double check, triple check. Make another phone call. Make another phone call.” But no matter how careful you are, you will make mistakes. And when you do, you have a responsibility to learn something from each of them, large or small.

ACKNOWLEDGE AND CORRECT MISTAKES What should you do when you get something wrong?

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First, acknowledge the error. You may discover it on your own, or you may hear about it from a reader, viewer or colleague. Or you may learn about it when social media gets hold of it and reports it to the rest of the world. Whether the mistake is minor or major, one of commission or omission, you must acknowledge your responsibility. This first step may be difficult. Nobody likes to be wrong, especially if it’s a significant error that could damage your reputation. Discovering a mistake in a story that you’ve labored over should hit you directly in the gut. You have seen what happens to the reputations of journalists who are inaccurate, and you know you can lose your job if you can’t get the facts right. You might convince yourself that the mistake wasn’t all that important, especially if no one else seemed to notice it. Why admit a minor flaw in an otherwise strong story? Some reporters ignore or try to cover up errors. Some may try to correct a mistake “silently” by fixing it online and not acknowledging that something was wrong in the first place. Don’t fall into those traps. As a principled journalist, you must acknowledge any mistake that is called to your attention or that you learn about independently. While it may seem counterintuitive, admitting and correcting errors can help restore your credibility and the credibility of your organization. For example, NPR says in its ethics handbook that it make corrections “to help keep the public accurately informed, not to absolve ourselves of our mistakes. We have a simple standard: Errors of fact do not stand uncorrected. If we get it wrong, we’ll admit it.”2 You may be embarrassed by such a public admission. Good. Errors should be embarrassing to journalists. But embarrassment over a mistake is relatively minor compared with the ethical problems that are created when mistakes are not corrected or are covered up. Your correction should be clear, concise and devoid of excuses. ProPublica says in its code of ethics that mistakes should be corrected “fully, quickly and ungrudgingly.”3 That should be your standard as well. Don’t duck responsibility if the error was something you could have and should have verified and corrected. Print and broadcast corrections should be published or aired quickly and prominently. Digital errors should be corrected as soon as possible. Corrections should also make clear what precisely is being corrected; don’t be coy in your explanations. A journalist who hides or ignores his mistakes may hold on to his job for a time. Eventually, though, the errors may become so significant that his stories collapse under their own weight. So will

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the journalist’s reputation and that of his news organization. Accept your responsibility – like the managing editor of Onward State did when it became clear that the website had prematurely reported the death of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. “I understand that our reputation is in serious question, but I hope you will continue to stand by us as we do everything in our power to make amends,” he wrote in a letter to readers. “To begin that process, I will be stepping down from my post as Managing Editor, effectively immediately. I take full responsibility for the events that transpired tonight, and for the black mark upon the organization that I have caused.”4

LEARN FROM YOUR ERRORS Acknowledging and correcting mistakes are not enough. You must also learn from them. Maurice Possley made a mistake when he was a young reporter at Chicago’s City News Bureau, which covered local and breaking news. Possley was writing a news obituary, a routine assignment except for one detail – the deceased was related to the editor of the Chicago Daily News. Possley made some calls and filed his story, which then went out on the bureau’s wire service to news organizations across the city. Paul Zimbrakos, the bureau’s city editor, soon got a call from someone at the Daily News. Possley had misspelled the first name of Daryle Feldmeir, the Daily News editor. “How could this happen?” Zimbrakos demanded. Possley knew what Zimbrakos really meant: How could you be so effing stupid? Someone at the Daily News gave Possley the name over the phone. “They either gave it to me wrong, or I took it down wrong. I never double-checked it,” Possley said. “All I had to do was look at the masthead of the damn newspaper.” Years later, after winning one Pulitzer Prize for the Chicago Tribune and being a finalist for three others, Possley still remembered his horrible feeling that day. “I was so embarrassed. We put it out on the wire and someone from the Daily News saw it and called up and said, ‘Hey, dopey, you misspelled Feldmeir’s name’.”5 It wasn’t a rookie mistake that Leon Dash remembered. He was an established reporter at The Washington Post, and his investigation of

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the nation’s prison system had been turned into a book. He had won an Overseas Press Club award for his 1973 series about the time he was embedded with rebel forces in Angola. Dash was working on a series about the spread of heroin in the nation’s capital when his managing editor assigned him to cover a big cocaine bust. Dash attended a news conference where details were rolled out, and his story ran on the front page. In it, Dash wrote about someone snorting a gram of cocaine. Readers called to point out that anyone who snorted that much coke would be dead within a couple of minutes. These were people who knew what they were talking about, namely drug users and dealers. Dash had substituted grams for milligrams, and no one caught the mistake before the story was printed. Dash, who won a Pulitzer Prize at the Post for explanatory journalism in 1995, was devastated. “This may not seem like a big deal to other people,” he said years later when he was an endowed journalism professor at the University of Illinois. “I was in too much of a hurry . . . What hurt me so bad was that it was a simple thing that I should have checked, and I didn’t check.”6 Marie Wilson was reporting on a race for the Illinois House of Representatives early in her career at the Daily Herald, which covers Chicago’s northern and western suburbs. Wilson wrote about a proposal by the incumbent that dealt with taxing retirement income for people over 65. It was complicated, but Wilson thought she understood it. She didn’t, and her story included mistaken information. The newspaper ran a correction, but the incumbent’s opponent repeated the erroneous information, in a different context, in a political ad right before the election. The incumbent, who had a recent DUI conviction, lost. There’s no way to know for certain whether her error affected the outcome. But Wilson still felt some responsibility. “Did he lose because of my error?” she said. “Probably not. People were telling me he had a DUI and he was never going to win. But I still felt that I affected that election in a way I shouldn’t have. My real mistake was I didn’t verify because I thought I understood. Sometimes it’s that last step you skip because you think you know.”7 When he was covering the 2018 Florida GOP governor’s primary for the Tampa Bay Times, Steve Contorno wrote a story that dealt with background checks for gun purchases. His story required a clarification over the way a detail was worded, and it was attacked at a

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press conference and called “fake news” on social media. Contorno lost sleep over the situation. He said he had conversations with his editors about what he could have done differently, but also about how to move forward covering the race. “We had to acknowledge that we didn’t have it perfect,” said Contorno, now the paper’s political editor. My editors weren’t taking me out back and beating me up over it. They obviously weren’t happy . . . But turning it into a learning experience not just for me but for the whole paper helped me get past it and realize that we’re not infallible, and that how we recover from those mistakes and move forward will define the rest of our careers.8 Moving forward is an important part of the process. That’s something that isn’t said often enough to young reporters, says Stephanie Lulay of Block Club Chicago. “You’re going to make mistakes,” she says. “The best reporters are quick to admit and fix them. Don’t think you can hide it. Just admit it, fix it, learn from it and move on.”9

APOLOGIZE, AND MEAN IT This last step may seem unconventional. Get in touch with the people who may have been affected or victimized by your mistake. Explain how it occurred, without shifting blame. You may get an angry reaction. But you may be surprised to find out how much people appreciate a candid apology and acknowledgment of responsibility for an error. And taking responsibility can sometimes help you build an even stronger relationship with a source. That was an insight one of Marie Wilson’s editors passed along to her. “Sometimes when you start out on the wrong foot with someone, you take your beating from them and say I’m wrong, and I’m going to do better,” her editor told her. Taking responsibility can turn the page, and you can build up the relationship from that.10

CONCLUSION The Columbia report about Rolling Stone’s mistakes with the rape story was unforgiving. Erdely, the writer, did not try to independently

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talk with Jackie’s three friends. Instead, they were given pseudonyms and their extensive quotes were based only on Jackie’s recollection of their conversations. The fraternity where the alleged rape occurred was contacted for comment, but it wasn’t given enough details or context to adequately respond to questions. The magazine also failed to identify Jackie’s date, who was also given a pseudonym, and it never verified his existence. Editors weren’t skeptical enough and failed to question the story’s reporting and sourcing, and the vetting process depended largely on four hours of conversation a fact-checker had with Jackie. The editors and reporter said they didn’t push Jackie for more details because they were concerned about her wellbeing as a survivor of sexual assault. But the Columbia report said many of the magazine’s faulty decisions had little or nothing to do with protecting Jackie. Rolling Stone retracted the story when the report was issued. But its senior editors were quoted as being unanimous in believing they didn’t need to change any editorial processes. In a New York Times interview after the report was released, Jann Wenner, the magazine’s publisher, described Jackie as “a really expert fabulist storyteller” who manipulated the magazine’s journalism process. He added that he wasn’t trying to blame Jackie, “but obviously there is something here that is untruthful, and something sits at her doorstep.”11 The Columbia report made specific recommendations that you can learn from: •• Avoid using pseudonyms. They raise doubts in readers’ minds. In this case, they were used to mask gaps in reporting. •• Check and verify derogatory information. That’s part of being fair. The story would almost certainly have changed if Jackie’s three friends had been interviewed. •• Confront subjects with details. The accused fraternity didn’t know what it had been specifically accused of until the story was published. •• Balance sensitivity to victims and the demands of verification. Failure to do this can subject victims to greater scrutiny and skepticism. We’ll talk more about this subject in Chapter 14. •• Corroborate survivor accounts. Verification is essential to the reporting process. It cannot be skipped. •• Hold institutions accountable. Being a watchdog is one of journalism’s basic responsibilities. We’ll talk more about this in Chapter 12.

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A University of Virginia administrator filed a $7.5 million defamation suit against Rolling Stone, saying the article depicted her as the “chief villain” of the story. When the lawsuit went to trial in Charlottesville, Va., in the fall of 2016, Wenner, the publisher, continued to blame the problems with the story on “Jackie,” and he said he disagreed with the decision to retract the entire article after the Columbia report came out. “We did everything reasonable, appropriate up to the highest standards of journalism to check on this thing,” he said in videotaped testimony. “The one thing we didn’t do was confront Jackie’s accusers – the rapists.” In November 2016, a federal jury awarded the administrator $3 million in damages. In June 2017, the magazine settled a defamation suit brought by the fraternity for $1.65 million. In September 2017, a federal appeals court in Manhattan ruled that a lower court erred in dismissing another defamation suit brought by three former members of the fraternity. That court ruling came two days after Jann Wenner announced plans to sell the magazine, which he founded 50 years earlier.12 You will make mistakes in your career as a journalist. Recognizing your fallibility does not lessen your obligation to strive for accuracy or to acknowledge, correct and learn from those mistakes. Commit yourself to getting things right; if you sacrifice accuracy for speed, your credibility and your reputation will crumble.

 CHECKLIST Bear Bryant, the legendary University of Alabama football coach, told his players that there were only three things they could do when they messed up on the field: Admit their mistake, learn from it and don’t make it again.13 Those principles also apply to your work as a journalist. •• Admit your mistake. When you discover you’ve made an error, don’t cover it up. It’s a sign of good character to take responsibility for things you get wrong. •• Correct it. It doesn’t matter whether it appeared online, in print, on the air or on social media. You should correct it as soon as possible and clearly identify what the mistake was. A defensive or confusing correction can be as bad as or worse than the original error.

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•• Apologize. You may not always be able to do this in person, but you owe it to your sources and the subjects of your stories to let them know that you take errors seriously and regret them. •• Learn from it. What caused the error? Review all the steps that led to your mistake, so you don’t make the same one again.

 ASSIGNMENTS 1. You’ve probably written a profile of an individual for class or for a student media publication or website. Ask the person you profiled to meet with you so she can read the story in your presence. Ask her to grade you on its accuracy. Are the names, ages, dates, addresses and other personal information correct? Does she feel she was quoted accurately, whether directly or indirectly? Did you get other details in the story correct? Did you make assumptions that were not substantiated by facts? Does your profile subject think the story has the proper context? Did she find anything unfair or inappropriate? 2. What grade did your profile subject give you? What kinds of errors or problems, if any, did she find? Were there common issues with things that were incorrect or not verified? What lessons can you learn from your mistakes? What can you learn from what you did well? 3. Read the Columbia Journalism School’s complete Rolling Stone report. What other lessons do you take away from what happened? The report is available at: www.cjr.org/investigation/ rolling_stone_investigation.php.

  OTHER RESOURCES Other news organizations have experienced stunning failures in reporting and editing that raised questions about their credibility and accuracy. Two of the biggest lapses occurred at The Washington Post and The New York Times. At the Post, a reporter created a compelling fictional account about an eight-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy and presented it as factual; the story was so compelling that it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981. (The Post returned the prize when it discovered the fraud.) At the Times, a young staff writer made up events, characters, quotes and details and also plagiarized material from other news sources in dozens of stories from 2001 to 2003. Both papers launched internal investigations of their journalistic failures, and each produced

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lengthy public accounts of what happened and why, and described steps that would be taken to prevent future journalistic frauds. Both reports provide lessons that you can learn from. Read the Post’s report at: www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/ 1981/04/19/the-players-it-wasnt-a-game/545f7157-5228-47b6-8959fcfcfa8f08eb/?utm_term=.4b91f7625da2. And the Times’ report at: www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/us/cor recting-the-record-times-reporter-who-resigned-leaves-long-trail-ofdeception.html.

NOTES 1 Shelia Coronel, Steve Coll, Derek Kravitz, “Rolling Stone’s Investigation: ‘A Failure That Was Avoidable,’” April 5, 2015. The Columbia report can be found at: www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation.php. Other details came from these accounts: T. Reese Shapiro, “Key Elements of Rolling Stone’s U-Va. Gang Rape Allegations in Doubt,” The Washington Post, December 5, 2014; Al Tompkins, “Investigation of Rolling Stone’s ‘A Rape on Campus’ Finds Journalistic Failure,” poynter.org, April 6, 2015; Ravi Somaiya, “Rolling Stone Article on Rape at University of Virginia Failed All Basics, Report Says,” The New York Times, April 5, 2015. 2 NPR Ethics Handbook, http://ethics.npr.org/category/h-accountability. 3 ProPublica Code of Ethics, www.propublica.org/code-of-ethics. 4 onwardstate.com, “An Apology from the Managing Editor of Onward State,” January 21, 2012. 5 Interview with Maurice Possley, January 24, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. 6 Interview with Leon Dash, January 27, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. 7 Interview with Marie Wilson, June 12, 2018. 8 Interview with Steve Contorno, June 21, 2018. 9 Interview with Stephanie Lulay, June 29, 2018. 10 Wilson interview, June 12, 2018. 11 Somaiya, “Rolling Stone Article on Rape at University of Virginia Failed All Basics, Report Says,” The New York Times, April 5, 2015. 12 Hawes Spencer, “Founder Says Rolling Stone Erred in Retracting Rape Article,” The New York Times, October 28, 2016; Ben Sisario, Hawes Spencer, Sydney Ember, “Rolling Stone Loses Defamation Case Over Rape Story,” The New York Times, November 4, 2016; Sydney Ember, “Rolling Stone to Pay $1.65 Million to Fraternity Over Discredited Rape Story,” The New York Times, June 13, 2017; Ben Sisario, “Rolling Stone Faces Revived Lawsuit Over Campus Rape Article,” The New York Times, September 19, 2017. 13 “Top 50 Quotes from Bear Bryant,” saturdaydownsouth.com; “Bear Bryant Quotes,” 247sports.com.

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The presidents of the United States and Russia had just concluded a news conference ending their July 2018 summit in Helsinki, Finland. For his first post-summit interview, Donald J. Trump sat down with Sean Hannity, host of a nationally syndicated radio talk show and of Fox News’s Hannity. “You were very strong at the end of that press conference,” Hannity said. “You said, where are the servers? . . . Where are the 33,000 emails? And there was this mystery answer that I think surprised a lot of people by the president of Russia, as it relates to the Mueller investigation.” “Well, first of all, he said there was no collusion whatsoever,” President Trump said. “I guess he said it as strongly as you can say it. They have no information on Trump . . . One thing you know: If they had it, it would have been out.” “He said it was nonsense,” Hannity said. “He said it’s nonsense, that’s right,” Trump said. He also says there is absolutely no collusion, which you know, and everybody that watches your show knows, and I think most of the country knows . . . I think it’s a shame . . . We’re talking about Syria and humanitarian aid . . . and we get questions on the witch hunt. And I don’t think the people out in the country buy it. But the reporters like to give it a shot. I thought that President Putin was very, very strong. Vladimir Putin’s only interview with an American news outlet after the summit was also with Fox News. Chris Wallace, the news anchor for Fox News Sunday, asked the questions, using a translator. His first was about the state of the U.S.–Russia relationship, but he quickly

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turned to the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He tried to give Putin a copy of federal indictments handed down three days earlier accusing 12 Russian intelligence agents, by name, of trying to disrupt the election. Putin smirked – “you smile, let me finish,” Wallace said – but the Russian president wouldn’t accept the documents, telling Wallace to set them on the table between them. Putin asked if Wallace really thought Russians could influence “the choice of millions of Americans.” “I’m not asking if they influenced,” Wallace said. “I’m asking whether they tried.” Wallace asked why Trump was reluctant to criticize Putin, citing a theory that the Russians had compromising information on Trump that was collected before he became president. “I don’t want to insult President Trump when I say this, and I may come [off] as rude,” Putin said. “But before he announced that he would run for [the] presidency, he was of no interest for us.” Why, Wallace asked, did Putin produce a propaganda video that showed Russian nuclear missiles hitting Florida near Trump’s Mara-Lago resort? “Aren’t you escalating the arms race, and . . . being deliberately provocative?” Putin said the missiles weren’t targeted at the United States, or Florida in particular. “There was not a caption saying Florida.” “No, but you can see it on the map,” Wallace said. Why, Wallace asked, did so many of Putin’s opponents end up dead? “All of us have plenty of political rivals,” Putin said. “I’m pretty sure President Trump has plenty of political rivals.” “But they don’t end up dead,” Wallace responded.1

Talk show host Sean Hannity was known as a defender and an adviser to President Trump; they talked by phone often, sometimes multiple times daily.2 In his 17-minute interview after the summit, Hannity didn’t question or challenge any of the president’s statements, and he allowed Trump to defend his policies and his meeting with Putin. Instead, Hannity offered commentary in support of the president’s positions. At the time of the summit, Chris Wallace, who the previous year had won the International Center for Journalists Founders Award for Excellence in Journalism, had not been granted an interview with President Trump since before his inauguration, despite multiple requests. In contrast to Hannity’s interview, Wallace was aggressive with Putin,

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asking questions that many thought Trump himself should have raised with the Russian during the summit. Wallace’s 34-minute interview ran during the 6 p.m. news segment and drew 3.2 million viewers, close to prime-time levels. Wallace spent months trying to set up an interview; an agreement was reached only when the Helsinki summit was announced. The single Russian condition was that the interview be aired in full. Putin tried to sidestep several issues, but Wallace pressed him, even correcting the Russian president on several points.3 Asking questions is what good journalists do. As you advance in your career, you will ask many people what they know and don’t know, what they heard and saw, what they think and believe, what they hope for. Doing this well requires practice and preparation, and then more practice and preparation. Good questions will illuminate issues and capture the personality and character of the people you’re writing about. You may never interview the president of the United States, or of any country. But you will talk to people running for local or state offices or people already elected to those posts. You’ll interview cops on the beat and teachers and students in local schools, and you’ll also talk with people who are served by the police and school systems. Most of the men and women you talk to may not be well known, but they may be involved in a news story, sometimes due to circumstances beyond their control. You will ask questions in various settings. You may find yourself on a quick phone interview to nail down information about an accident, a crime or a governmental action. You’ll compete with reporters from other news organizations to gather information at the scene of a breaking story. Or you may work on a profile or in-depth piece and get to conduct lengthy interviews with sources about complicated topics. Some interviewees will be cooperative. Others, like Putin, may be contentious. You’ll be prepared for some interviews, but others will come on short notice, with little time to prepare all the questions you’ll need to ask. Imagine any scenario and you’ll probably experience it sooner or later.

SUBSTANCE OVER STYLE John Sawatsky, an award-winning investigative journalist in Canada, studied how journalists conduct interviews because he wanted to know why some interviews succeed while many others fail. He reviewed transcripts and recordings of thousands of interviews to see

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how journalists frame and ask questions, with a goal of changing the culture of the interview. The successful interview, Sawatsky determined, depends more on the question-asker than on the answer-giver. A journalist’s questions should be precise instruments, he says, but too often they are wielded haphazardly and without enough thought. Unprepared journalists improvise interviews and find themselves at the mercy of their subjects. If the subject is friendly and takes pity on the reporter, the interview may yield something newsworthy. If the subject is unfriendly or hostile, the reporter may be left with little or nothing of substance. According to Sawatsky, a journalist should: •• Ask open-ended, neutral questions that require the subject to provide specific details, explain unseen causes and clarify underlying motivations. •• Avoid charged language or loaded words. Questions should probe tough issues without necessarily sounding tough or confrontational. •• Keep questions short and focused. Don’t overload them with details that will allow the subject to answer selectively. Don’t be fooled by what seem like tough interviews on network or cable news. Often, Sawatsky says, the questioner is more interested in how he comes across to his audience than in the information he obtains. In these instances, the focus is on the interviewer, not the subject of the interview, and the emphasis is on style rather than substance. The goal in these cases is entertainment, not journalism, Sawatsky says. Interviewers in those settings ask tough-sounding questions when they should be exploring tough issues. “Are you cheating on your wife?” sounds tough, but the answer probably will be “no.” Instead, Sawatsky says, ask the subject to describe his relationship with his wife, and then build on the answers: “When was your last vacation together?” “Where did you go?” “What did you and your wife do together last weekend?” “How did you spend your free time?” His technique requires flexibility to build on the subject’s answers. The effective journalist doesn’t recite a list of questions but engages with the interviewee. Open, neutral, lean: That’s the mantra Sawatsky uses to teach reporters, producers and anchors at ESPN, which hired him in 2004 to train its journalists how to conduct good interviews.4

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TALKING TO STRANGERS Interviewing requires you to move out of your comfort zone and approach people you may not know. You may discover that talking to strangers is one of the scariest things you do as a beginning journalist. But your job requires that you conquer your fear of talking to people you’ve never met. David Rosenthal, managing editor of the health-care initiative Side Effects Public Media, encourages interns and beginning reporters to get comfortable with striking up conversations with people they meet. You’ve got to ask a lot of questions of perfect strangers. You’re a reporter and you can walk up to the mayor or the governor or the head of the bank and ask them questions. You can’t be shy about doing that. Unfortunately, some young people are more used to communicating through texts or social media than engaging in real conversations. For these individuals, the notion of actually talking to a stranger may be frightening. “I tell them don’t be afraid,” Rosenthal said. “You’d be surprised [that] people generally do want to talk to you. All you have to do is engage them and they’ll tell you lots of stuff.”5 Inexperienced journalists may lack confidence to approach someone they don’t know, especially about sensitive or private matters. You may be convinced that someone won’t talk with you. But you won’t know until you ask. Be bold. You’ll be turned down sometimes, but you’ll find that many people are willing to tell what they saw, what they heard, and what happened to them. Don’t depend on social media or e-mail for substantive matters. They don’t allow you to ask immediate follow-up questions or to explore important details. They can be prone to misinterpretation, by you and your subject. They are useful to verify facts and details after a personal conversation, but not to discuss sensitive or emotional issues.

PREPARING FOR THE INTERVIEW Jacqui Banaszynski, a Pulitzer Prize winner and a professor emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, says a key step in preparing for an interview is to ask yourself these basic questions:

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Why are you working on this subject? What do you need to know, and how will you get it? What’s your initial focus? What kinds of challenges will you face?6 Reading is essential. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh says the core lesson of being a journalist is “read before you write.”7 Tampa Bay Times political editor Steve Contorno prepared for covering a candidate in the 2018 Florida governor’s race by reading everything written about the politician over the previous 25 years.8 Ron Nixon, international investigations editor for the Associated Press, says journalists need to read beyond just their immediate assignments. “Be curious about everything,” says Nixon. “Read everything. We don’t read enough outside our profession.”9 You will not always have a lot of time to get ready, of course. As you start out as a journalist, most of your interviews will probably come on short notice, and you will have to prepare as thoroughly as you can. A quick search of stories in your organization’s electronic archives can turn up background information about a person or an issue. You can Google material from other sources as well: Resumes, stories and articles from other news organizations, as well as official records and documents. Even a little bit of background information can give you ideas about things to look for and questions to ask. Your research can also help you figure out what not to ask. Leon Dash says many reporters get canned responses from people who are used to being interviewed. If your research turns up the same answers over and over again, Dash says, try to figure out the questions that haven’t been asked. Your job, after all, is to turn up new information and details that haven’t been previously reported.10 As always, be careful with any material that you find online. Even legitimate sources may contain erroneous information. Verify anything that you haven’t gathered independently. Just because it’s online doesn’t mean it’s true.

APPROACHING YOUR SUBJECT Part of a successful interview is explaining who you are and what your job is, especially if you’re interviewing someone unaccustomed to talking to a reporter. Help her understand why you’re interested in her story, and assure her that you’ll do your best to tell it fairly and accurately, even if you have to ask hard questions about sensitive topics. Help her understand how readers or viewers might respond to her story.

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Always get a phone number so you can call back to double-check facts or ask follow-up questions. Phone calls can be faster and more reliable; e-mails or texts can be easily ignored or missed entirely. The best interviews are partnerships. Your subject has a story and you want to tell it. Treat her with respect. She’ll realize if you try to manipulate her, so being forthright increases the likelihood that she’ll tell you what you need to know. The Golden Rule doesn’t often get cited in journalism classes or newsrooms, but it’s worth remembering in all your dealings with people you come in contact with: Treat them the way you’d want to be treated.

HONING THE CONVERSATIONAL INTERVIEW Your most comfortable interviews may seem more like conversations. Your subject has a story, and you simply let her talk. Terry Gross, who has conducted more than 13,000 interviews as host of NPR’s Fresh Air, is a recognized master of the art of conversation. She’s been called the “unofficial poet laureate of the interview” and described as “the most effective and beautiful interviewer of people on the planet.” In a New York Times Magazine profile, Gross said her goal is “to be the person who gets it. Like somebody who can tell you something really personal . . . [and] you can ask them something that can help them comfortably move to the next place and go deeper.” She continued: “Hearing someone speak really personally, and having that affirm your experience as a sexual person, or as a sick person, or just as a person trying to get through daily life, is really valuable.” She said she loves interviewing artists because they open up what novelist John Updike called “specimen lives” and what Gross called “examples of what it’s like to be human.”11 Another master of this form was Studs Terkel, a Pulitzer-Prizewinning author who chronicled the stories of Americans in a dozen books, collecting accounts about the Great Depression, World War II and the everyday lives of working men and women. He loved conversations in which his subjects discovered things about themselves they never realized before. In a PBS NewsHour segment, he recalled a recorded interview with an unmarried mother of four who lived in a Chicago housing project: “We play it back and she hears her voice, and she says something, suddenly puts her hand to her mouth and says, ‘Oh, my God!’ I said, ‘What is it?’ She said, ‘I never knew I felt that way before’.”

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“It’s not an interview; it’s a conversation,” Terkel continued. “You, yourself, enter it, too. I’m not the guy from 60 Minutes coming down to talk to them.” The best question, Terkel often said, was: “And then? What happened next?”12 Andre Schiffrin, Terkel’s longtime editor, said people told Terkel the truth even when they had lied to themselves their whole lives. “The key thing was his respect for them,” Schiffrin recalled after Terkel’s death in 2008. “He wasn’t there to use them. He wasn’t there to make a point. He really wanted to hear what they had to say.”13 Terkel said he was just talking to people. The journalist’s job, he said, is to try to see the world through the eyes of the person he’s talking to, if only for a day. Gross and Terkel honed their skills over decades of talking and listening to people about things important to them. You may think those techniques can be easily and quickly learned. Don’t be fooled: They require as much careful preparation and discipline as any interview. Don’t try to wing it through even the friendliest, most non-threatening encounter. The more prepared you are, the easier it will seem. Your job is to pay attention and to listen well, a skill that will be discussed further in Chapter 6. Be genuinely interested and curious about what your subject thinks and does. And always remember that, when you’re talking, she isn’t. Keep your mouth shut most of the time. When you do speak, remember Sawatsky’s advice – open, neutral, lean – and frame questions carefully, making sure they draw out information and don’t shut it off. Paraphrase what you’ve heard to ensure that you’ve understood it. And if something doesn’t sound or feel right, ask more questions to clarify.

HANDLING THE DIFFICULT INTERVIEW Shortly before his appointment as New York Times publisher became official, A.G. Sulzberger described his experiences as a reporter in a New Yorker interview. I’ve always had a theory that decent journalists are contrarians by nature, because they have to ask tough questions of people. They have to ask tough questions of people, and assume people are lying to them, and wake up in the middle of the night wondering if they got something wrong.14

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Sometimes you will be faced with a contentious interview with someone who is dead-set on keeping you from learning what you’re trying to find out. You may be talking to a skilled public relations person or a spin-doctor intent only on getting across her argument or point of view. She may ignore your questions and give answers to questions you didn’t even ask. Your subject may be an elected or appointed official trying to keep something hidden from public view. Or you may be talking to someone who simply doesn’t trust reporters and wants nothing to do with you. The best questions for these occasions are informed ones, says Eric Nalder, a two-time Pulitzer-Prize winner for The Seattle Times. You need to bone up on the specifics of the topic in question, and know what your subject has said about it previously. Approach your subject only after careful planning, which may require rehearsing the questions you need to ask. Have confidence that you’ll get the information, Nalder says. Reporters who don’t believe they will get the interview almost always fail. “As far as I’m concerned, no one should ever refuse to talk to me,” Nalder writes in “Loosening Lips,” his guide to the art of the interview. “It works.” (https://ijnet.org/en/story/loosening-lips-art-interview.)15 Your most uncomfortable interview may require you to talk to someone who’s suffered a traumatic experience, perhaps the death of a family member or friend. You will need to balance your journalistic mission with respect and empathy for the person you’re interviewing. Never forget that you’re talking to a real person with feelings and emotions. Treat him fairly and with sensitivity. •• Make sure he understands you’re a journalist. Be sure to identify your news organization. •• If you’re talking about someone who has died, explain that you want your readers to know what the person was like, what kind of life she lived, what was important to her. •• Respect his emotions; crying is not a sign of weakness but a normal response to trauma. •• Give him the time he needs to gain his composure. And honor the fact that he may not be able to talk to you at that particular moment. •• Prepare for your own emotional response to a traumatic story. You’ll come away from such stories with a mixture of emotions,

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which is natural. You are human and have feelings too. Don’t ignore them. •• Don’t ask someone who is grieving, “How does it feel?” It’s a question that people are hard-pressed to answer with any real meaning. Your job, of course, is to tell stories, says Maria Ines Zamudio, immigration reporter for WBEZ Chicago, but with minimal consequences for the people you’re talking to. “Are you making this person relive something that they’re not comfortable reliving?” she asks. “Because a lot of trauma, when you talk about it, is reliving it. You really have to think about that stuff. I think a lot of journalists forget that.”16 We’ll take a more in-depth look at this topic in Chapter 14.

CONCLUSION John Sawatsky, Seymour Hersh, Leon Dash, Terry Gross and other skilled interviewers preach preparation and methodology. As with everything in journalism, the more prepared you are for interviews – even the friendly ones – the better the results will be. Preparation doesn’t mean blindly following a list of planned questions. You should be ready to adjust depending on what your subject tells you. According to Sawatsky, a good interview is built on the answers the subject gives, not just on prepared questions. Be flexible, alert and attentive to what is said, as well as to what is unsaid. If your subject makes assertions, probe for details and evidence. Use your questions as a roadmap, but don’t let them keep you from taking interesting and important side trips. Take into account how much time you have for your interview with a difficult subject. In his memoir Reporter, Seymour Hersh describes what he calls the “Hersh rule”: Never begin an interview by asking core questions.17 It’s good advice, but you may find yourself with barely a half-hour, or even less, to talk with someone about a critical issue. In those situations, your questions need to be ordered and tightly focused. Don’t waste time going over facts that are already on the public record or common knowledge. Ask about what isn’t known, what hasn’t been revealed. Your subject may go off on a rhetorical tangent and try to sidestep your questions. Be firm and ask your question again. Never hesitate to ask for further elaboration or explanation.

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Always remember what your goal is as a journalist. “Journalism,” Sawatsky told American Journalism Review, “is about directness, precision, clarity, about not confusing people. . . . Questions are supposed to get answers. Questions that fail to get answers are not tough enough.” Journalism’s “coin of the realm,” according to Sam Dolnick, a New York Times assistant managing editor who oversees digital initiatives, is “the ability to find out new facts and to uncover things that someone doesn’t want you to uncover.” Your job is to reveal new information about the person and the topic you’re writing about. You’ve succeeded when you produce something new and enlightening.18

 CHECKLIST •• Be prepared. The more homework you’ve done for any interview, the better it will be. •• Be yourself. Study and learn from experts, but don’t try to be a Chris Wallace or a Terry Gross. Find your own voice and be comfortable with it. •• Choose the right setting. Offices are convenient, but they can be filled with distractions and interruptions. Outdoors can be noisy too. Homes are great; many people are comfortable talking at their own kitchen table. •• Tap into your subject’s ability to remember. Ask him to try to remember specific details and events. Ask what the weather was like, what he wore, what he heard and saw. •• Don’t be afraid to admit you don’t understand something. The only really stupid question is the one you don’t ask. Clarify it if it’s not clear. Ask your subject to say more about that. Nashville Public Radio News Director Emily Siner says the most important question to ask when something isn’t clear is: “What do you mean?”19 •• Ask why. Why did you do this? Why were you there? •• Take good notes. Even if you’re recording your interview, take notes. They will help you organize your thoughts, and come in handy if your recorder malfunctions. (Make sure you know the laws in your state concerning two-party recordings. Some states require consent from both parties.) •• Don’t be late. You get only one chance to make a good first impression. Don’t blow it with someone you’ve never met before. Arrive early and use the extra time to collect your thoughts and think through your interview.

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•• Dress appropriately. You want to be taken seriously? If you dress like a sloppy college student, that’s how you’ll be treated. You may need to describe your subject’s clothes, but you don’t want her talking about how you were dressed after you leave. •• Be professional. Don’t yawn. Turn off your cell. Make eye contact with the person you’re talking to. •• Make your last question count. Ask if there’s anything you should have asked and didn’t. Pulitzer-Prize winner David Halberstam said the best question a reporter can ask is, “Who else should I see?”20 Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel would end interviews by asking, “What do you know for sure?”

 ASSIGNMENTS 1. The mantra that John Sawatsky drills into ESPN journalists as they prepare interview questions is: open, neutral, lean. With that in mind, record at least two in-depth interviews on competing networks or cable news shows, and then analyze and compare the questions that were asked based on Sawatsky’s techniques. How many questions were open-ended, and how many could be answered with a yes or no? Were they neutral, or did they offer opinions? Did the questions contain too many details and lead the interviewee in a particular direction? Did you learn anything new from the interviews? 2. Now do the same thing with a recording of one of your recent interviews. How many of your questions were open-ended, and how many could be answered with a yes or no? Did you use neutral terms and language? Did you offer your own opinion about the subject matter? Were your questions sharp and lean, or did you include too many details? What new information did you learn?

  OTHER RESOURCES Nearly four months after he interviewed Vladimir Putin, Fox News’s Chris Wallace got his first interview with President Trump. You can find clips and a transcript of the full interview at: www.realclearpolitics.com/ video/2018/11/18/president_trump_on_divided_congress_mueller_ foreign_policy_fake_news_more.html.

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How does this interview compare with his earlier interview with Putin, and with Sean Hannity’s sit-down with the president after the Helsinki summit? On the 30th anniversary of Fresh Air, New York magazine asked Terry Gross and her team to come up with a list of her ten favorite interviews. The list included artists and entertainers, authors and a Marine Corps mortuary officer. One interview was with Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are and other classic children’s books. Gross has said the Sendak interview is the one that surprised her more than any of her other interviews. You can listen to all ten interviews at: www.vulture.com/2017/05/fresh-airterry-gross-best-interviews-npr.html.

NOTES 1 Video and transcript of the Wallace–Putin interview: www.foxnews.com/ transcript/2018/07/16/chris-wallace-interviews-russian-president-vladimir-putin.html. Video of the Hannity–Trump interview: https://video.search.yahoo. com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-pty-pty_forms&hsimp=yhs-pty_forms&hspart=p ty&p=hannity+trump+interview+transcript+helsinki#id=1&vid=84032f 58c60e5f20c8941152fa2eeff6&action=click. Transcript of the Hannity–Trump interview: https://factba.se/transcript/ donald-trump-interview-sean-hannity-fox-helsinki-july-16-2018. 2 Olivia Nuzzi, “Donald Trump and Sean Hannity Like to Talk Before Bedtime,” New York, May 14, 2018. 3 Michael M. Grynbaum, “TV Anchors Agape After the Trump–Putin Appearance,” The New York Times, July 16, 2018; Michael M. Grynbaum, “Chris Wallace on Interviewing Putin, and Why He Isn’t Afraid to Visit Russia,” The New York Times, July 22, 2018; Aaron Blake, “Fox News’s Chris Wallace Gives Putin the Grilling Trump Won’t,” The Washington Post, July 16, 2018; Jen Kirby, “The 6 Most Bizarre Moments from Trump’s Post-Putin Interview with Sean Hannity,” vox.com, July 16, 2018. 4 Susan Paterno, “The Question Man,” American Journalism Review, October 2000; David Folkenflik profile of John Sawatsky, NPR All Things Considered, August 14, 2006; Jason Fry, “John Sawatsky is Highly Questionable,” ESPN.com, May 1, 2012. 5 David Rosenthal interview, June 22, 2018. 6 Natalie Mazotte, “Guide for Reporters Who Want to Master the Art of the Interview,” knightcenter.utexas.edu, July 8, 2013. 7 Hersh, Reporter, p. 253. 8 Steve Contorno interview, June 21, 2018. 9 Ron Nixon interview, July 7, 2018.

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10 Leon Dash interview, January 27, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. 11 Susan Burton, “Terry Gross and the Art of Opening Up,” The New York Times Magazine, October 21, 2015. 12 Terence Smith, interview with Studs Terkel and Alex Kotlowitz, PBS NewsHour, August 3, 2005. 13 Stephanie Simon, “Studs Terkel, Writer and Radio Personality, Dies at 96,” Los Angeles Times, October 31, 2008. 14 David Remnick, “Conversation with A. G. Sulzberger, the New Leader of the New York Times,” newyorker.com, December 22, 2017. 15 Eric Nalder, “Loosening Lips,” https://ijnet.org/en/story/loosening-lipsart-interview. 16 Maria Ines Zamudio interview, June 16, 2018. 17 Hersh, Reporter, p. 108. 18 Sam Dolnick, “Tapping Technology to Shape Journalism’s Future,” The New York Times, January 4, 2018. 19 Emily Siner interview, June 24, 2018. 20 The Narrative Journal, Report from the 2003 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, December 12, 2003, https://poynter.blogs.com/ narrative/speakersdavid_halberstam/index.html.

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Listen Carefully, and Pay Attention

Early each semester, Leon Dash gives students in his immersion journalism class at the University of Illinois a taste of the interviewing techniques he honed over more than 30 years as a Washington Post reporter. He pairs students together and instructs each to question the other about their earliest school memories. In one class, a student told her partner about growing up in southern India. Even though she was Hindu, she had been sent to a Catholic school for first grade. Each day, she said, she was required to wear a different uniform to class. The Indian student finished her story, and her interviewer began to ask about her experiences in second grade. No, no, no, Dash said, interrupting the questioner. Ask her how she got back and forth to school, he said. Her parents weren’t going to let a five- or six-year-old girl walk to school by herself. The student said an auto rickshaw took her to class each day. Satisfied with the answer, her interviewer again prepared to move on. No, no, no, Dash repeated. Ask who drove the rickshaw. Was it someone in her family? The interviewer followed Dash’s directions. The student said her family hired a driver to take her to and from school every day. This was a teachable moment for Dash. In just a few minutes, he asked the class, what has she told us about herself? Even if you don’t know the intricacies of Indian society, what have you been able to learn? No one seemed to know. She’s Hindu, Dash continued, but she’s going to a Catholic school because her parents obviously believe that’s where she’ll get a quality education. They have the money to pay for a driver to pick her up, take her to school and bring her home again every day.

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That’s not an average Indian family, Dash said. It’s an elite family. And you’ve learned all of that in just a few minutes. With, of course, considerable help from Dash.1

Dash’s method of interviewing is designed to help students in his immersion reporting class examine contemporary social phenomena through the lives of individuals and families. By semester’s end, his students will have spent 20 or more hours interviewing profile subjects about their first school memories, their earliest recollections of family life, their religious upbringings, and, finally, their lives outside the family. Dash says his methodology can be used to examine living conditions, family histories and attitudes of ethnic groups at any class level. He used it during the four years it took to report his 1994 Washington Post series about Rosa Lee Cunningham and her family. The series, which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, told a story about the black urban underclass through the experiences of one woman, her children and her grandchildren. Dash devised his methodology to satisfy his curiosity about why people turn out the way they do and where and how they fit into society. He says a joke in the Post newsroom was that he was the only anthropologist on the reporting staff. People give us a universe in their answers to our questions, Dash says, and he tries to teach his students how to see and hear the stories in each universe. He believes curious students can extract surprising revelations about their subjects’ needs, desires and motivations. And his students learn how the personalities, circumstances and the choices made by parents and preceding generations influence the lives of the profile subjects today. Dash teaches his students how to ask questions for long-form journalism. But he also teaches them to pay attention to the context of what is revealed in the answers they’re given, and to be alert to the nuances of what is left unsaid. Dash teaches students to listen. It may be one of the most important lessons they learn.

LISTENING IS NOT ALWAYS EASY You can distinguish yourself as a journalist by asking good questions, but you will excel only when you listen carefully, paying close attention to the answers you’re given.

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Listening well doesn’t come naturally to most people. It’s a skill that must be developed, and too many of us don’t take the time to master it. Pay attention to almost any conversation going on around you and you’ll see that few people are truly interested in listening to what someone else is saying. More likely, each person is thinking about what to say next, if he’s even paying attention to the conversation at all. Good listening is important in all aspects of our lives. If you don’t listen carefully to your professors in class – or worse, if you’re checking Twitter or Instagram when you should be paying attention – you may miss an assignment or blow a question on the final exam and fail the class. You could lose your job if you don’t listen to your boss’s instructions. Personal relationships also hinge on effective communication, which includes listening well. If in the future you don’t pay attention to what your partner or spouse tells you, and vice versa, your relationship will suffer. There’s a subtle but important distinction between hearing and listening. Robert Stevenson, a professor of journalism at Lander University in Greenwood, South Carolina, describes the distinction this way: Hearing is to listening as talking is to public speaking; hearing and talking come naturally, but listening and public speaking take training and practice. Reporters, Stevenson says, must be active listeners, listening not for entertainment but for comprehension.2 Listening, Fresh Air’s Terry Gross says, is hard. Listening sounds like it should be easy, but it’s not, because while I’m listening, I’m also thinking ahead. I’m thinking, Is this an interesting answer? If I was editing this answer, what would I be editing out and what would I be keeping in? Because if I’m going to ask a follow-up question, I need to know if the listeners have heard what I’m following up on . . . I’m also thinking, Is this interesting enough to follow up? If so, what is the follow-up? Or is this something I should just say, ‘Time to move on to another subject’.3 CNN’s Social Discovery team spends a lot of time on the phone questioning people to verify the authenticity of audio, video and other accounts of news events that trend on social media. Senior Producer Christina Zdanowicz says her best advice for students is: [T]o just listen. When you’re starting out you’re so worried about the next question. But if you’re not listening you may

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miss the opportunity for excellent follow-up questions, or more interesting quotes that will lead you down another path to a different arc of the story, to something you may not have thought of.4 Follow-up questions are essential to conducting substantive interviews. Margaret Sullivan, the media columnist for The Washington Post, wrote about how important they are in an article about Chris Wallace’s at-long-last interview with Donald Trump. In comparing Wallace’s style to Sean Hannity’s, she praised Wallace for pursuing questions with repetition and restatement; she dismissed Hannity’s style for “sycophancy” and giving the president the opportunity to “ramble on.” “The art of the interview almost always lies in the ability to follow up,” Frank Sesno, director of George Washington University’s media school, told Sullivan. Follow-ups allow a questioner to “refine, seek detail, challenge inconsistency and pursue further explanation of what has been said – or not said – in the initial response.” The follow-up question is “a pillar of accountability journalism,” said Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief.5 But you’ve got to listen carefully first. During an interview you may be in such a hurry to get to your next question that, like Dash’s students, you don’t pick up on an important detail your subject has revealed. You may simply ask questions by rote and miss a subtlety that, if explored, could provide enlightenment. If not for Dash’s prodding, his students would have missed important details about their Indian classmate by hurrying through their questions and not thinking about her answers. Avoid making these related mistakes: •• Judging the answers that you’re given. Dash advises his students to wear a poker face and keep questions as neutral as possible. •• Thinking you already know the answers to the questions you’re asking. •• Believing that nothing your subject says will change your ideas about the topic at hand. •• Focusing too hard on taking notes to the point that you don’t absorb what’s actually being said. Sometimes you may end up talking more than the person you interview. When this happens, you’ve become the focus of the interview instead of the person you’re talking to.

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“Using a tape-recorder taught me my most important lesson of interviewing: To shut up,” says Chip Scanlan, an author of journalism textbooks who directed writing programs for 15 years at the Poynter Institute. It was a painful experience, having to listen to myself stepping on people’s words, cutting them off just as they were getting enthusiastic or appeared about to make a revealing statement. There were far too many times I heard myself asking overly long and leading questions, instead of simply saying ‘Why?’ or ‘How did it happen?’ . . . and then closing my mouth and letting people answer.6 “People think when you interview that you talk a lot,” Terry Gross says. “Actually, I listen a lot. I talk very little.”7 Your job as a journalist is to find out what someone else knows. You won’t learn that if you do most of the talking.

Journalists aren’t the only professionals who don’t listen well. In an NPR essay, Dr. Alicia Conill, a clinical associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, said studies show that it takes about 18 seconds for a physician to interrupt a patient who is talking, and the doctor gave an example from her own experience. Conill was on hospital rounds one day and made her last stop at the bedside of an elderly woman. The woman asked Conill to help her put on her socks. Instead, Conill looked at the woman’s charts and then launched into her own monologue. The woman stopped Conill. “Sit down, doctor. This is my story, not your story.”8

SHARPENING YOUR LISTENING SKILLS How can you become a better listener? First, remember that the interview is not about you. Don’t be a show-off. Concentrate on the person you’re talking to and give full attention to everything she says. You can facilitate this by:

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•• Not writing everything down. That’s what your recorder is for. Be selective as you take notes. Jot down key words or phrases and use them to formulate further questions. •• Not interrupting. Let a silence linger. Many people are uncomfortable with silence and will continue talking unprompted, offering unsolicited and often unexpected details. •• Repeating for clarification. Make sure you understand what your subject means. “What I hear you saying is . . .” or “Say more about that.” •• Paying attention to your subject’s body language. If in a face-toface interview your subject seems nervous or distracted, try to ease her worries or concerns. Watch your posture and body language as well. •• Not hurrying your subject. Let him answer your questions and finish his sentences. Doing otherwise suggests that you know what he is going to say. You don’t. Finally, remember that there is more to an answer than spoken words. Emotions and feelings may be communicated by nonverbal means. Being a good listener means paying attention with all of your senses, not just your ears.

 TIPS FROM YOUNGER JOURNALISTS: BUILD YOUR NETWORK It’s important to form real relationships with people, to keep in touch and support them. Network. Be pro-active. Have coffee with someone new once a week . . . The more people who know what you want to be doing, the more they might think of you. Having someone up the totem pole who can advocate for you is really important. Candice Norwood, web producer/ writer, Governing magazine Just asking people out for coffee to talk was a big revelation for me. It’s easy to assume that someone with experience is not really interested in younger people, but they really want to help you. I’ve gotten to where I am because people have given me advice and leads on jobs. It’s important to find people you can

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relate to in terms of diversity and representation. Staying in touch with editors I liked and reporters I worked with and like was important. Emily Siner, news director, Nashville Public Radio There’s a tendency to buy into the impostor syndrome a little bit. “I’m not good at data analysis, so I shouldn’t even try.” Try even harder to find mentors who can tell you it’s okay to fail when you’re learning something. Ask for help. I’ve never known a journalist to say no. Katie Foody, Associated Press reporter, Denver Young journalists in college should find conferences that are central to whatever they want to go into. Network, and meet as many people as you can who are doing the kind of things you want to do. Janelle O’Dea, data reporter, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Become a member of a journalism organization so you can find a network of people. Find mentors for journalism, for FOIA, for other things. It really helps to have someone who’s been through it, someone on the other side who’s been through it. Maria Ines Zamudio, immigration reporter, WBEZ Chicago9

LISTENING PAYS OFF Listening well can lead to what Leon Dash calls “epiphanies,” something that makes you see or understand a story more clearly than you could have imagined. Dana Priest and Anne Hull won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their Washington Post series about inadequate and alarming conditions that injured soldiers and Marines were forced to endure at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Much of the early reporting, Hull said, began with the reporters simply hanging out with people who had been treated at the hospital.

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“One of the things that I learned in doing this story is the importance of listening,” Priest said. The art of listening is so fundamental to what we do. And if you have a heightened ability to do that, and a heightened sense of that importance, you can pick up so much. That person standing there, reading his body language, not a complainer, macho guy, not supposed to be wounded, not feeling comfortable enough to tell us the whole truth about [Walter Reed] because he didn’t even know us. But there is just so much in his voice . . . So I tell myself when I start new projects, just listen, and it does pay off.10 For more than 15 years South Carolina was among the top ten states nationally in the rate of women killed by men; the state topped the list three times. That was the finding in an annual report by the Violence Policy Center, and it caught the attention of journalists at the Charleston Post and Courier, the state’s largest newspaper. Investigative reporter Douglas Pardue had recently completed a four-part series called “The Forgotten South Carolina” in which he explored disparities in income, education and health in 26 counties that were near the bottom of national averages for quality of life. Now here was another list that South Carolina topped, and it wasn’t a list anyone wanted to be on. Pardue and investigations editor Glenn Smith figured they could spend a couple of weeks of research and interviewing to gauge whether this would be a separate project or just another entry in the “Forgotten South Carolina” series. But the more they scratched the surface, the more they realized how deep the story was. First, they got the numbers. Over the previous decade, more than 300 women had been shot, stabbed, strangled, beaten, bludgeoned or burned to death by men in the state. Women were being killed at a rate of one every 12 days. Pardue knew they needed to put those numbers in perspective. They discovered that more than three times as many South Carolina women had been killed by men than the number of state soldiers killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the previous year, the murder rate for women was twice the national rate. The numbers were staggering. “While this was a data-driven story, we wanted it to come alive with the people,” reporter Jennifer Berry Hawes told journalism students at the Indiana University Media

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School in 2016. “I wanted the women to know they were not the only ones going through this.” They began trying to find answers to why things were the way they were. Pardue and Hawes interviewed the director of a shelter for abused women and their children; the director had also been a victim of domestic violence. What is it, the reporters asked, that makes South Carolina the No.1 worst state in the country for men killing women? “She starts reeling off answers,” Pardue said. “There’s poverty, traditionalism, southernism, isolation, alcoholism . . . Then she stops and says, and there’s that religion thing.” Pardue and Hawes looked at each other: What religion thing? “Till death do us part,” the shelter director said. Pardue said he and Hawes locked eyes again, “and that was the first time I’ve ever worked on a series and I knew the title before I finished the first interview.” The Post and Courier reporting team began to explore more deeply South Carolina’s religious culture and how conservative Christian teachings about the subservient role of women played a major role in the problem. They talked with a sheriff in a rural county where four domestic killings occurred over a year; law enforcement had not been alerted to any problems in the families before the killings. The public did not see domestic violence as a public health issue. The sheriff met with pastors to try to challenge the belief that family violence should be resolved at home. “The ministers told us, ‘It’s really a family issue. They need to work that out,’” the sheriff said. “But in some cases it’s like telling a victim to go running back into a burning house.” The shelter director put it this way: “You can die, but you can’t get divorced.” Pardue, Hawes, Smith and Natalie Caula Hauff spent a year reporting “Till Death Do Us Part,” a seven-part series that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Hawes told the Indiana University students that the team had mixed feelings when they left for New York to receive the Pulitzer because it appeared that domestic violence reform legislation had gotten bogged down in the state legislature. The Pulitzer was presented at the Lowe Memorial Library at Columbia University, and the team had just walked outside the building when Hawes got a text message from a colleague: The reform bill had passed. In many ways, she said, that news was better than winning the Pulitzer.11

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CONCLUSION Listening to people – really listening to them – proves you are interested in what they have to say. Think about it: You’re probably flattered when someone shows real interest in what you think. Show your subjects the same interest and courtesy, and they’re more likely to continue telling you important things about themselves and issues that are important to both of you. Reporters who listen well exhibit humility, a characteristic not often associated with journalists. Ken Auletta, who writes about the media for The New Yorker, says humility is important because “it aids two of a journalist’s irreplaceable tools: The curiosity to ask questions and the ability to listen to the answers. Each requires modesty because each requires us not to assume that we already know the answers.”12 The first step in learning, Socrates said, is to recognize what you do not know. As a beginning journalist – even as an experienced journalist – remember this. No matter how much you’ve researched, no matter how much you think you know about a topic, you still don’t know it all. You may, in fact, know very little. Listen to the answers to your questions, and you’ll be constantly surprised by what you learn.

 CHECKLIST •• Focus on your subject. She’s the reason for the interview, not you. •• Remember that listening is more than simply hearing. Use all of your senses. Pay attention to your subject’s demeanor and body language, and to yours, too. •• Don’t be afraid of silence. Use it to your advantage by waiting for the other person to speak first. •• Be respectful. Turn off your cell and don’t check for text messages or look at the time as if you’re bored. Give your subject the attention she deserves. Above all, don’t yawn. •• Stay humble. You may be prepared, but you don’t know the answers to your questions yet.

 ASSIGNMENT In your assignment in the last chapter, you analyzed the quality of the questions in one of your interviews. Listen to the interview again, but

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this time pay attention to how much time you talked and how much time you gave your subject to answer questions. Who talked more? How do you think the balance of time between your questions and the subject’s answers affected how much you got out of the interview? Did you miss any obvious follow-up questions because you weren’t listening carefully? Based on your two analyses, what could you have done to improve your performance in the interview? What lessons will you apply to future interviews?

  OTHER RESOURCES Jay Allison is an independent journalist who produces The Moth Radio Hour for Atlantic Public Media and PRX. In a “Brief But Spectacular” episode of the PBS NewsHour, Allison talked about how he finds stories for radio and the importance of paying attention: www.youtube.com/watch?v=H00VKvU5OaQ. David Isay is founder of StoryCorps, an ongoing oral history project that has collected thousands of conversations between ordinary people about their lives. In a 2015 TedTalk, Isay described how the project began and played excerpts from some memorable episodes. He also talked about the importance of simply taking the time to listen to others: www.ted.com/talks/dave_isay_everyone_around_you_has_a_ story_the_world_needs_to_hear?language=en. Krista Tippett also interviewed Isay for her April 17, 2014, “On Being” radio show. You can listening to the program, “Listening as an Act of Love,” at https://onbeing.org/programs/david-isay-listening-asan-act-of-love.

NOTES 1 Interview with Leon Dash, January 27, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. 2 Robert Stevenson, “Effective Listening,” https://doctorrobsblog.com/ 2008/02/28/effective-listening. 3 “In Conversation: Terry Gross,” www.vulture.com/2018/01/terry-grossin-conversation.html. 4 Christina Zdanowicz interview, July 20, 2018. 5 Margaret Sullivan, “Sean Hannity, Chris Wallace and Why Trump Wants to Control Follow-Up Questions,” The Washington Post, November 25, 2018. 6 Chip Scanlan, “The Power of Listening,” June 30, 2003, www.poynter. org/reporting-editing/2003/the-power-of-listening.

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7 “In Conversation: Terry Gross,” www.vulture.com/2018/01/terry-grossin-conversation.html. 8 Alicia Conill, “Listening is Powerful Medicine,” NPR Weekend Edition Sunday, February 1, 2009, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=100062673. 9 Interviews with Candice Norwood, June 9, 2018; Emily Siner, June 24, 2018; Katie Foody, June 16, 2018; Janelle O’Dea, June 30, 2018; Maria Ines Zamudio, June 16, 2018. 10 Dana Priest and Anne Hull, Nieman Reports, summer 2008. 11 Interview with Douglas Pardue, July 13, 2018; Emma Grubman, “Pulitzer-Winning Team Discusses Finding Stories ‘So Obvious We Don’t See Them’,” January 28, 2016, mediaschool.indiana.edu/news; The Post and Courier’s series can be found at: http://postandcourier.com/app/tilldeath/index.html. 12 Ken Auletta, Backstory: Inside the Business of News, Penguin, 2003, introduction; “Whom Do Journalists Work For?” Red Smith Lecture in Journalism, Notre Dame University, 2005.

7

Be Skeptical

Reporters from around the country camped out for two days in Sago, West Virginia, in January 2006, covering the story of 13 coal miners trapped two miles underground by an explosion. Rescue crews had to wait 12 hours before entering the mine because of high levels of carbon monoxide and methane gas. Once inside they moved carefully, checking for seeping water, unstable roof conditions and dangerous gas buildups. The miners’ families gathered at a church to wait, and pray. Outside, newspaper, radio and television reporters provided round-the-clock coverage of the disaster, but new developments came at an agonizingly slow pace. As midnight approached, surprising news began to spread. Almost 40 hours after the explosion, rescuers had reached the miners. Word was that one miner was dead, but 12 had survived. Church bells began to ring, and people started cheering. Joe Manchin, then West Virginia’s governor, was with the families and said he’d also heard the good news. Cautiously at first, CNN reported that the families had been alerted to the rescue. Within 15 minutes, the network presented the survival as fact. “There is elation at this moment,” Anderson Cooper said. Other news outlets carried similar bulletins. “I spoke to a number of family members who were just pretty much ecstatic,” a reporter for West Virginia Public Broadcasting told NPR. Newspapers made the rescue their lead story for the morning editions. “Miracle in Mine,” read the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s headline. USA TODAY proclaimed “‘Alive’ Miners Beat Odds.” But something didn’t seem right to Becky Wagoner, a reporter for The Inter-Mountain, a daily newspaper in nearby Elkins. A native of

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the coalfields, she was the first reporter on the scene after the explosion, and she knew some of the miners and their families, as well as many of the people involved in the rescue. She had stationed herself at the media center where authorities had provided regular but gloomy updates during the day. Now no one was at the media center, and Wagoner was skeptical. If the news was good, why didn’t authorities make it official? She also heard that 12 ambulances had arrived at the mine entrance, but only one had driven away. Why was that? Other stories began to circulate. One said the ambulances were taking survivors to the church to meet their families. Wagoner knew that didn’t make medical sense, but emotions were high, and people latched on to the optimistic reports. The truth slowly emerged. Instead of 12 survivors, only one miner was alive – a miracle, yes, but not the one trumpeted by news media around the country. The Associated Press moved a bulletin with a corrected report, but it was too late for many newspapers in the East and the Midwest. The Rocky Mountain News in Denver discarded 10,000 copies that carried the erroneous story. CNN was the first cable network to correct the story at 2:45 a.m., nearly three hours after its initial report. NPR corrected its story by 3 a.m. Wagoner had stayed on the phone with her editor, who told her what CNN was reporting. But there was never any confirmation to support that story. Wagoner and her editor had an advantage because the InterMountain had an afternoon deadline, but they still resisted the temptation to post an online story. In the end, they got the story right, in print and on the website. “Most everybody took everything that was coming out as gospel,” Wagoner said of the confusion that night. “A lot of people didn’t take time to stop and think about what they were hearing.”1

Warning bells failed to go off for many reporters at Sago. At the time, Ralph Hanson was a journalism professor at West Virginia University. He had gone to bed after seeing online reports that the miners were alive. When he read the erroneous Associated Press account in his morning paper, he knew something was wrong. The story cited only one official – the governor – who said, “They told us,” with no name given. The story had no details about the conditions of the miners, and it said the mining company did not confirm the rescues.

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Hanson, now at the University of Nebraska Kearney, analyzed how the coverage went so wrong. Newsrooms faced tight deadlines, but they should have made clear that their first reports were unconfirmed. News organizations, he said, had become comfortable passing along stories that were actually rumors. The story didn’t have to be true; it was enough that a story was being reported a particular way.2 The country wanted to hear a miraculous story of a rescue. When the first unconfirmed stories came out, many reporters and editors were swept up in the euphoria of the moment, and they failed to abide by one of journalism’s cardinal rules: Check it out. Sago happened before the Facebook and Twitter era, but the rush to get the story out on traditional media created the same problems then that have plagued journalism on social media in the years since. You may want to be first with a story, but you must first be right. You can never be too skeptical of stories you’re told as a journalist or of the documents you’re given. Refusing to make assumptions or jump to conclusions will protect you as you sort truth from lies and conspiracy theories, facts from fake news and rumors, and relevant details from insignificant fluff. Skepticism will keep you from jumping on bandwagons and making careless mistakes that will undermine your credibility. Your job is to clarify and explain. You cannot do that if you haven’t verified your stories by checking and double-checking your sources of information.

HUMAN SOURCES ARE FALLIBLE Be wary of people who are convinced they know what happened; they may not know. They may tell you what they believe or what they’ve heard from someone else. Their accounts may be speculative or even wishful. Ask them this key question: “How do you know?” It will allow you to test their accounts for accuracy and completeness through subsequent questions, research and reporting. Your primary responsibility is to your readers and viewers, not to your sources. You want to maintain good relationships with sources, of course, but don’t write stories with the aim of pleasing them. When someone gives you information, it’s your job to ask for details to verify its authenticity. Ask: •• How do you know this? •• Where can I find out more?

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•• Who can tell me something else about this? •• Where can I find pertinent documents and records? •• Where can I go to see for myself the things you’ve described? Make it clear to your source that your job is to tell the story as completely and accurately as possible, and that means you must ask additional questions and take nothing at face value. Don’t assume others have followed up on the details of a story. One of the last living suspects in the 1963 church bombing that killed four black schoolgirls in Birmingham, Alabama, claimed he’d been home watching wrestling on TV when the attack took place. Years later, reporter Jerry Mitchell of the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger had doubts about the alibi, so he checked TV listings in old newspapers; no wrestling was broadcast at that time. “For three and a half decades, his alibi had gone unchallenged,” said Mitchell, who won numerous awards for investigations of crimes committed during the civil-rights era.3 Eyewitnesses are valuable sources, but approach their information with skepticism as well. Two people who experience an event may provide startlingly different accounts. Talk to first responders on the scene of the wreck or fire, but also look for people who showed up later. They’ll add information to round out the story and make it more complete. Use the tips discussed in Chapter 5 to formulate questions that will draw out concrete details about an event, and avoid asking questions that will elicit broad generalizations – or worse, just a yeah or a nope. The more specific the details and the more similarities you find in separate accounts, the more confident you can be in your reporting. If you’re writing a profile, research the person independently of your interview. Spot-check his credentials by calling places he said he worked or went to school. (As journalists have learned in the past couple of years, you may even need to go back to high school or college yearbooks to check something out.) The higher the honor or the achievement, the more you need to verify its authenticity. The Congressional Medal of Honor Society (CMOHS) maintains an archive of all recipients, including a separate list of living medal winners, on its website: www.cmohs.org. It’s quick and easy to check, but how many people question a self-proclaimed Congressional Medal of Honor winner? As a journalist, you need to be one who does. And don’t take what people tell you about themselves at face value. Carl Sessions Stepp, who taught journalism for 35 years at the

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University of Maryland, recalled a story he wrote as a reporter about a person who said he quit his job as matter of principle. Stepp said his story “glorified” the man for his stand. Years later, Stepp ran into the man at a party, and the man admitted that he’d been fired and came up with the resignation-on-principle as a cover. Stepp said he didn’t check out the man’s story thoroughly enough. “Dig deep,” Stepp wrote in an American Journalism Review article about lessons learned in his career. “Write with humility. On almost every story, there are things you don’t know yet.”4 Attribute information from sources carefully and precisely. You may not be able to independently verify everything you’ve been told when your deadline is tight, so it’s important to explain exactly where you got your information and what steps you took to try to confirm it. If there are holes or gaps in your story, be transparent and let your readers know what they are.

The winner of the 1995 Miss Virginia Pageant had a wonderful story of persistence: She’d finally won the pageant in her fourth year of competition. Her resume was exceptional. She’d been a star athlete and an honor graduate in high school, and now she was Phi Beta Kappa and a magna cum laude graduate of Virginia Tech. She’d been accepted to law school, and her ambition was to find ways to help poor children get to college. The pageant took place every summer in Roanoke, Va., and the job of covering it for The Roanoke Times usually fell to an intern. Shannon Harrington, a recent college graduate, had the assignment in 1995, and he wrote about the winner’s achievements. Then her story began to unravel. The Phi Beta Kappa chapter at Virginia Tech said she was not a member of the academic honorary society. Harrington checked other parts of her resume and discovered they weren’t true either. She explained that the discrepancies were simple misunderstandings, but the damage was done. The pageant board demanded her crown, and she eventually resigned. It hadn’t occurred to Harrington that a Miss Virginia contestant might embellish her resume, but his editors realized they should have anticipated that possibility. Major discrepancies would likely have surfaced if her claims of academic honors, public service and professional experience had been merely spot-checked. Harrington’s work on the story earned him a full-time job at the paper. As a reporter for Bloomberg News years later, he said the Miss

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Virginia experience taught him the importance of being skeptical about everything he was told, no matter who said it or where it came from.5

CHECK DOCUMENTS AND RECORDS Apply the same tough standards of verification to documents and records you use in your stories. An official record can strengthen your story, and you can certainly enjoy a legal privilege to quote freely from such documents. But records and documents can also be problematic because people prepare them. A police report may be based on an eyewitness who really didn’t see everything she claimed she saw. A clerk may have transposed numbers on a spreadsheet. A court clerk may have transcribed data incorrectly, or a court reporter may have misspelled someone’s name. A sworn statement may be based on a hazy recollection, a faulty perception or even a willful intent to mislead. Be as skeptical of records and documents as you are of the people you interview. Check and double-check all of your information, no matter where it comes from. Documents – more than 100,000 pages worth – were essential to the New York Times reporting team investigating Donald J. Trump’s finances. Reporters David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner worked more than 18 months on their story, which was published in October 2018 and ran more than 14,000 words. The story made the case that Trump was not the self-made billionaire he claimed to be; his father had made significant monetary contributions to his holdings. The story also documented that Trump participated in questionable tax schemes to increase his wealth. Barstow said their story was a classic example of “shoe-leather and knocking on doors, talking to a lot of people” to get access to nonpublic documents as well as expert explanations and interpretations of what the records meant. “It takes a lot of luck, and you need to create a lot of luck for yourself,” Barstow told an audience at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., three weeks after the story was published. “It’s not like we woke up one day and there were a hundred thousand pages sitting in our mailbox.”6 The work by the Times team, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, illustrates what Brant Houston, the Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois, calls a “documents state of mind.” In The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook: A Guide to Documents, Databases and

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Techniques, Houston provides guidelines for finding and verifying information in primary documents such as lawsuits, transcripts of legislative hearings or campaign finance reports. Houston also instructs students about the importance of “interviewing” documents and databases just as they would interview a human subject. “A database alone is not journalism,” he writes in Data for Journalists: A Practical Guide for Computer-Assisted Reporting. “Instead, it is a field of information that needs to be harvested carefully with insight and caution. It needs to be compared with and augmented with observation and interviews.” You should find people who can explain what the document means and put it in context. This may be the person who created the document, or it may be the custodian of the record. It may be an outside expert who has a deep understanding of events or issues that led to the document’s creation. And even though you can safely quote from an official document, you should try to find an independent and authoritative source to help explain it clearly and concisely to your readers or viewers.7 And always carefully attribute information from official records and documents. You can lose your protective, legal privilege if you make mistakes in your citations and references to official records.

USE OBJECTIVE, SCIENTIFIC METHODS TO CHECK YOUR WORK Journalism is a discipline of verification, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel write in The Elements of Journalism. Your task is to correctly report what has happened by adopting an objective methodology that, if not strictly scientific, comes close to that standard. Kovach and Rosenstiel take pains to explain what they mean by journalistic objectivity. A common misunderstanding is that journalists are free of bias. But we are all subject to biases, consciously or unconsciously. Your goal is to report stories in ways that take the biases out of play so they do not contaminate the information you present. Journalistic objectivity, Kovach and Rosenstiel say, requires you to develop “a consistent method of testing information – a transparent approach to evidence – precisely so that personal and cultural biases” do not undermine the accuracy of your work. For Kovach and Rosenstiel, the intellectual principles of a science of reporting are:

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•• •• •• •• ••

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Never add anything not there to begin with. Never deceive your audience. Be as transparent as possible about your methods and motives. Rely on your original reporting. Exercise humility and remain skeptical of your own understanding. Continue to question your conclusions.8

Carl Bernstein, who won a Pulitzer Prize with Bob Woodward at The Washington Post for coverage of the Watergate scandal, describes this process as one of “sustained inquiry,” of always asking what is missing, what the details are, and what the further explanation might be. “Our assumption of the big picture isn’t enough,” Bernstein told the White House Correspondents’ Association in 2017. Our preconceived notions of where the story might go are almost always different than the way the story comes out when we’ve done the reporting. I know of no story that I’ve worked on in more than half a century of reporting that ended up where I thought it would go when I started on it.9 For nearly three decades Ken Ward Jr. reported on the human and environmental impact of energy industries at the Charleston Gazette (now The Gazette-Mail) in his home state of West Virginia. The recipient of a 2018 McArthur Foundation “genius” grant, Ward routinely applies the scientific method in his reporting. It’s OK to start with a theory or a hypothesis, he says. We’re taught this line of BS about not having any feelings or any thoughts or being objective or unbiased, instead of being taught to be smart and be fair and gather facts . . . it’s OK to have that hypothesis, if you try to rigorously disprove your own hypothesis.10 Follow the evidence. Abandon your pet theory when the facts don’t support it. Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman said the scientific method consists of three parts: Observation, reason and experiment. A theory must satisfy all three elements, but the experiment is key. “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong,” Feynman wrote.11

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Journalism isn’t science, but you must take an objective approach in collecting and verifying information. There’s nothing wrong with beginning a story with a theory. But you must test your assumptions against the evidence you uncover. Every reporter can tell you about a great hunch that never developed into a story because the facts did not support it. Don’t let your hunches take you places that are unsubstantiated by the facts.

TRUST, BUT VERIFY For 30 years Edward H. Eulenberg was an editor at Chicago’s City News Bureau, where generations of young reporters learned the profession. He’s credited with establishing the rule that became the bureau’s slogan: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. That rule continues to motivate the best reporters to this day. Editors at the bureau demanded that reporters ask every question they could think of to get as many details as possible for their stories. They also required that each detail, no matter how small or obvious, be confirmed and then confirmed again. Reporters were forbidden to speculate, assume or suppose. Sources had to be nailed down; information had to be verified.12 Pete Weitzel spent 38 years at The Miami Herald; during his more than a decade as managing editor, the Herald won eight Pulitzers and numerous other national and regional awards. But he got his basic training as a 17-year-old copy boy/cub reporter at City News Bureau where he once chased down a tip about the murder of a former lieutenant of gangster Al Capone. Weitzel was in a hospital waiting room when an ambulance team brought in the mobster’s body, his chest ripped open by shotgun blasts, a large bullet wound in the forehead. Weitzel immediately called his editor to report the killing. “How do you know he’s dead?” the editor demanded. “I’m looking at him,” Weitzel answered. “He’s dead.” “Are you a goddamned doctor?” the editor asked. “Get him pronounced!” Weitzel turned to a white-coated man who just entered the room. “Are you a doctor? Is he dead? What’s your name?” The doctor pronounced the mobster very dead. This time, Weitzel’s editor accepted the report.13

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Monica Davey had no professional experience before she landed a job at the City News Bureau. She soon learned that nothing she was told was gospel, no matter who the source might be. Chicago’s daily newspapers routinely ignored what they dismissively called “cheap murders,” shootings in bars, domestic killings and the like. City News Bureau reporters, though, covered every homicide. It wasn’t easy; the police were notorious in the way they dealt with new reporters. The cops often made up stories, piling on elaborate and sometimes disgusting details that gullible rookies swallowed whole. The cops would then sit back and laugh to themselves as the reporter called in the phony information to the bureau. Davey understood that she needed sharp instincts and had to approach each story with a skeptical eye. If she didn’t, her editors would trip her up because their job was to punch holes in stories and to send reporters back to ask questions they should have asked the first time. A lot of reporters gloss over gaps in their stories, Davey says. The City News Bureau didn’t allow that. Reporters who didn’t have the answers would get caught and be sent back to ask the questions again. Davey’s experience at City News taught her that the editors’ questions weren’t personal; they were designed to make her stories better. “Not knowing something is not the worst thing in the world,” says Davey, Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times. “I don’t mind saying, ‘I don’t know the answer but I’ll find out’.”14

Brian Thevenot was covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2005 when two soldiers told him that a freezer inside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center contained the bodies of “30 or 40” victims killed during the storm. They said one victim was a seven-year-old whose throat had been cut. Thevenot saw four bodies lying under sheets outside the freezer, but the soldiers wouldn’t allow him to look inside. He quoted the soldiers by name and used their descriptions in his story. But no one had actually seen bodies in the freezer; the soldiers had heard the story second-hand. No mass of bodies was ever found. Other shocking reports came out of New Orleans: Murders, rapes, thugs shooting at rescue crews, bodies piled up in a school and at the SuperDome. Even though most of the accounts were unverified and had scant, if any, attribution, some found their way into news stories that were published or aired.

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Thevenot corrected his erroneous report in a subsequent story that addressed other rumors and false accounts. In an American Journalism Review article, he examined the “myths” that were spawned in the days and weeks after the hurricane and the journalistic failures that led to erroneous and, in some cases, racially stereotyped news stories. Acknowledging that first reports in breaking news situations are often wrong, Thevenot said journalists should ramp up their skepticism when they’re first reporting about chaotic situations. He cited three basic steps to improve the process. The first is to question sources about their sources: How do they know that? Did they see it? Who told them? Are they 100 percent sure it happened? Can someone else confirm it? The second is careful and frequent qualification, including, when necessary, a simple sentence that says: “This account could not be independently verified.” The third, he said, is an attitude that embraces correcting major news stories as news itself, not as something to be buried in a corrections column or at the end of a newscast. Thevenot didn’t blame the soldiers who told him about the bodies in the freezer. They believed they were telling the truth, and they were busy with the more important job of keeping people who were still alive from dying. “It was my job to make sure what they said was true.”15

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SKEPTICISM AND CYNICISM Skepticism, Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh says, is the instinct that drives much investigative reporting.16 It should be part of every journalist’s DNA. The challenge is to keep it from turning into cynicism. In a 2005 commencement address at Williams College, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman told how a young editor named Nathaniel Nash befriended him in 1982. Nash’s colleagues thought his niceness would work against him as a journalist. It didn’t, Friedman said, because Nash understood the distinction between skepticism and cynicism. “Skepticism is about asking questions, being dubious, being wary, not being gullible, but always being open to being persuaded of a new fact or angle,” Friedman said.

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Cynicism is about already having the answers – or thinking you do – answers about a person or an event. The skeptic says, ‘I don’t think that’s true; I’m going to check it out.’ The cynic says, ‘I know that’s not true. It couldn’t be. I’m going to slam him.’ Nathaniel always honored that line. Nash was killed in 1996; he was the only American reporter on U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s plane when it crashed in Croatia. Real journalists, Friedman said, are not the talking heads you see on cable news. Real journalists . . . go off to uncomfortable and often dangerous places like Croatia and get on a military plane to chase after a visiting dignitary . . . all to get a few fresh quotes, maybe a scoop, or even just a paragraph of color that no one else had. My prayers were too late for Nathaniel, but he was such a good soul, I am certain right now that he is sitting at God’s elbow – taking notes, with skepticism not cynicism.17 Peggy Noonan drew a similar distinction in a 2018 Wall Street Journal column about the growing lack of public trust in American institutions. Skepticism involves an intellectual exercise: You look at the grand surface knowing it may not reflect the inner reality. It implies action: If it doesn’t, try to make it better. Cynicism is a dodge: Everything’s crud, you’d be a fool to try and make it better, it’s all irredeemable and unchangeable.18 It may be hard these days to not be cynical, but as a journalist you must guard against it. Skepticism nurtures good journalism; cynicism suffocates it. Skepticism lends itself to creativity and imagination; cynicism never does. We already have more than enough cynical journalists in our world. We don’t need any more.

CONCLUSION Chicago’s City News Bureau closed on December 31, 2005. Its last dispatch went out just before midnight, with a lede that echoed the kind of questions its editors had asked young reporters for decades: “Was the victim killed where his body was found or was he dumped there?”19

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As that final dispatch shows, you cannot take things at face value. First reports are frequently wrong. It’s a skeptical journalist’s job to distinguish truth from fiction, or from lies. Filing a good story means you believe and can verify everything you’ve written. Your information may seem solid: It may come from official records, the governor, the police chief, the president. Or your source might be a pageant winner, or even your mother. Check it out anyway. Trust but verify.

 CHECKLIST •• Accuracy is your first responsibility. Check and double-check your facts. •• Approach your story like a scientist. Test your theories and assumptions, and follow the evidence. •• Don’t be overconfident. You may think you have all the answers, but you probably don’t. •• Use common sense. If something seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t. •• Review your assumptions. We go into almost every story with a theory about how it will turn out. Keep your mind open to the possibility that things may be different from what you assume. •• Don’t rush to judgment. Heed your deadline, but be patient as you pursue facts. You want to be first, but you must be right. It’s better to be second and correct with a story than to be first and wrong. •• Give everyone a fair shake. Always present someone’s best defense in your stories. Let your readers or viewers make up their own minds.

 ASSIGNMENTS 1. In his biography Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson writes about the seven years Albert Einstein worked as a patent examiner. His boss told him to think that everything the inventors said on their patent applications was incorrect; Einstein’s job was to check it all out. Following Einstein’s example, review your next story as though you’ve got it wrong. Look at your story with a skeptical eye and prove to yourself that you’ve got your story right. Also look for what’s missing;

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figure out what you don’t know and what you need to know. Notice things that don’t add up, and try to fill in the gaps. 2. Over the coming week, analyze the content of the news stories you read and hear. Look for examples that seem to illustrate the difference between healthy skepticism and any instances of journalistic cynicism. Pay particular attention to commentaries in which reporters express thoughts about issues in the news. How often do you witness a cynical attitude? Are those attitudes backed up by facts, or are they merely opinions?

  OTHER RESOURCES At the end of Chapter 3 you looked at On the Media’s Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook for a checklist on how to sort good information from bad. Brian Thevenot’s essay for American Journalism Review, “Myth-Making in New Orleans,” is a narrative about reporting mistakes that occurred during Hurricane Katrina that you can also draw lessons from. You can find it in the December–January 2006 online American Journalism Review archives at https://ajrarchive.org/archive.asp. Carl Sessions Stepp got his first byline in 1963 in his local paper when he covered a baseball game as a high school student. Fifty years later, he put together a list of ways that journalists can serve their audiences better. One, about skepticism, was mentioned in this chapter. You can read some of his other suggestions at: http://povichcenter.org/fifty-ways-to-serve-your-readers and http://povichcenter. org/what-i-learned-from-richard-nixon.

NOTES 1 Interview with Becky Wagoner, February 23, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition; David Folkenflik, “Sago: The Anatomy of Reporting Gone Wrong,” NPR All Things Considered, January 4, 2006; Mark Memmott, “Media Forced to Explain Inaccurate Reports on Tragedy,” USA TODAY, January 4, 2006; “Sago Mine Tragedy: 8 Years Later,” The Inter-Mountain, January 2, 2014. 2 Ralph Hanson, “What Went Wrong With Reporting on the West Virginia Mine Disaster,” January 5, 2006, http://ralphehanson.com/blog/ archive_06_01.html. 3 Terence Smith, interview with Jerry Mitchell, PBS NewsHour, April 18, 2002; Sherry Ricchiardi, “Out of the Past,” American Journalism Review, April/May 2005.

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4 Carl Sessions Stepp, “50 Ways to Serve Your Readers,” American Journalism Review, ajr.org, June/July 2013. 5 Interview with Shannon Harrington, May 20, 2008, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. 6 David Barstow, Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes As He Reaped Riches From His Father,” The New York Times, October 2, 2018; “A Conversation with David Barstow of the New York Times,” Washington & Lee University, October 31, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IeGdrkk2EI. 7 Brant Houston and Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc., The Investigative Reporters Handbook: A Guide to Documents, Databases and Techniques, 5th ed., Bedford St. Martins, 2009; Houston, Data for Journalists: A Practical Guide for Computer-Assisted Reporting, Routledge, 2018. 8 Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and What the Public Should Expect, revised ed., Three Rivers Press, 2007, pp. 70–93. 9 Benjamin Mullin, “Read Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s Remarks to the White House Correspondents’ Association,” poynter.org, April 30, 2017. 10 Erin Beck, “West Virginia ‘Genius’ Reporter Still Has Questions,” The Register-Herald, October 21, 2018. 11 Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, MIT Press, 2001, p. 156. 12 Arnold Dornfeld, Behind the Front Page: The Story of the City News Bureau of Chicago, Academy Chicago Publishers, 1983. 13 Interview with Pete Weitzel, January 26, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. 14 Interview with Monica Davey, January 13, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition; Davey, “Memories Well Up as Reporters’ Boot Camp Nears End,” The New York Times, December 13, 2005. 15 Brian Thevenot, “Myth-Making in New Orleans,” American Journalism Review, December/January 2006. 16 Hersh, Reporter, 324. 17 Thomas Friedman, “Listen to Your Heart,” Commencement Address at Williams College, June 5, 2005. 18 Peggy Noonan, “We Must Improve Our Trust,” The Wall Street Journal, June 2–3, 2018. 19 Andrew L. Wang and Dave Wischnowsky, “City News Becomes the News at Closing,” Chicago Tribune, January 1, 2006.

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German machine guns spit bullets at Allied soldiers as they jumped from landing crafts and waded ashore on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944. Photojournalist Robert Capa was shooting pictures from one of the boats when a boatswain kicked him out. Capa hit the cold water and made his way 100 yards to the beach, where he crawled behind a burned out amphibious tank for protection. Capa continued shooting pictures as mortar shells rained down around him. He tried to load a new roll of film, but his hands were shaking too hard. Live soldiers lay motionless on the beach; only the dead were moving, their bodies rolled by the waves. Without thinking, Capa splashed through the water toward a medical transport, holding his cameras above his head. Once on board, he put in fresh film and shot a last photo of the carnage on what came to be called “Bloody Omaha.” Back in England, Capa turned down a plane ride to London where someone wanted to interview him about his experience as the only war photographer to make it to the beachhead on D-Day. Instead, he turned in his film and caught the first boat back to the war. A week later, he learned a lab technician had used too much heat to dry his negatives, destroying most of them. Of 106 pictures he took on Omaha Beach, only eight images were salvaged. Capa remained with the Allied forces in Europe during the last year of World War II. In April 1945 he climbed to the fourth floor of a building in Leipzig in eastern Germany where five GIs had set up a machine gun to cover an assault on a bridge. Capa walked onto a balcony to take a picture of a young corporal firing the weapon. Suddenly, the soldier slumped back into the apartment; he had been

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shot between the eyes. Capa took another picture, documenting one of the last U.S. combat fatalities of the war in Europe. Capa took an assignment in 1954 from Life magazine to cover the French Indochina war. In May he was in Vietnam’s Red River delta when he stepped on a land mine. His leg was blown to pieces; he was dead by the time he was taken to a medic’s tent. He still had his camera with him. Robert Capa was 40 years old.

Capa’s war photos are some of photojournalism’s most famous images and established his reputation as one of the great battlefield photographers. His pictures stir us with images of heroism and horror; they also inspire us by the courage it took to get them. Capa knew there were no shortcuts to covering war – or anything else. He knew that if you really want to report a story, you must go to where the story is unfolding. If that means marching with troops through rain and mud and snow and cold, that’s what you do. Capa’s photographic legacy endures, more than 65 years after his death. But an equally important part of his legacy is the credo he lived by: If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.1 Capa was talking about photojournalism, and it’s a truism that all dedicated photographers understand: If you’re not there when it happens, you don’t get the picture. But it applies to all forms of journalism. If your stories aren’t good enough, you probably weren’t close enough to report them well. Distance prevents you from obtaining on-the-scene color and facts, face-to-face interviews and sensory details that raise a story above the ordinary. You must go out into the world where people live, work and die and absorb as much of the richness of their lives as you can. Put yourself in the places where you can see firsthand what’s happening. Your stories will become more authoritative, compelling and accurate.

GOOD STORIES ARE OUT THERE We all want to craft our stories artfully and tell them well. Too many times, though, beginning journalists think writing counts the most. They haven’t learned that the hard job of reporting must take place before they write the first word. Some may even think there’s no difference between writing and reporting. Both are difficult and important. But they’re not the same.

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How well you write won’t matter if you don’t have good reporting to support it. The best reporting comes when you are immersed in the scene, seeing, hearing, smelling and feeling what has happened. The closer you are to the story, the better your reporting will be. One of the great things about journalism is the opportunity to go places, see things and meet people. David Carr, who covered the media for The New York Times, described reporting as “a grand, grand caper. You get to leave, go talk to strangers, ask them anything, come back and type up their stories, edit the tape.”2 You can and should use social media to find sources for stories, but always try to talk to them face to face. You will never be able to eliminate phone interviews; they save time and help you work efficiently, especially on deadline. But discipline yourself. When it’s possible and practical, talk to people in person. You’ll learn more when you’re sitting across from someone than when you’re both disembodied voices on the phone. And if you’re developing a beat, it’s important that the people on the beat recognize you. When they know your face, they’re more likely to give you information, tips and leads for your stories. Going to the scene, approaching people you may not know and observing a situation firsthand will be one of the most important things you learn to do. Going out into the world is what the best journalists have always done, even in this digital and device-dependent age. The best stories will not come to you; they are out there, and you have to find them.

“YOU’VE GOT TO GO OUT” Haynes Johnson won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for his coverage of the civil rights struggle in Selma, Alabama. He understood the importance of being there, and lamented that too many young reporters didn’t have that same appreciation. He wrote that: In the old days, journalists used to cite approvingly Joseph Pulitzer’s famous adage about what formed the essentials of effective journalism: accuracy, accuracy, accuracy . . . I would add another maxim: shoe leather, shoe leather, shoe leather. Shoe leather that is worn and expended in the search of the real-life stories of real people. A little bit of knocking on doors is one useful step along that journey. You don’t get there by cyberspace alone.3

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Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer Robert Caro is recognized for his extensive field research, especially for his multi-volume series about President Lyndon Baines Johnson. “I’m convinced that whenever you go into the field, whether you know it or not, you’re absorbing a lot,” Caro said. When he began the Johnson books, he and his wife Ina – the only person besides Caro to conduct research for the books – moved to Texas for nearly three years to get a sense of the place where Johnson grew up and to interview people who knew him. “We’d work all day in the Johnson Library in Austin and then at five, I’d drive out to the Hill Country, where Lyndon Johnson had grown up, to do interviews,” Caro said. “Driving out there, seeing the emptiness of the place, gave me a feeling for the incredible loneliness, isolation, and poverty he’d grown up with. I came to feel it had shaped Lyndon Johnson.”4 Jimmy Breslin was a Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist for the New York Daily News. He focused on ordinary people, people other reporters never thought to talk to, like the cemetery worker who dug the grave at Arlington National Cemetery for President John Fitzgerald Kennedy after his assassination in 1963. Breslin described his job as “walking up tenement steps and ringing doorbells,” and he knew he needed to find out as much about a story as he could. “If you get more information, your story is better,” he said. “But you’ve got to get so much in order to know what to leave out.”5 That meant getting out on the streets. When asked by CUNY TV, “What’s wrong with journalists today?” Breslin replied: “They don’t go out! Television would be your answer. They’re all on television, giving the news. As you listen to them talk, you know they haven’t left the office.”6 Being there matters, says Monica Davey, Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times. You get different material when you’re on the ground, talking to people face to face, seeing where they live and what their circumstances are. “It’s hard to argue against the beauty of being there,” she says.7 Bob Woodward says “showing up” was the principle behind much of his and Carl Bernstein’s reporting on the Watergate scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation as president in 1974. Part of their system was “going to the homes of people, knocking on doors when we had no appointment.” Woodward said an official in Nixon’s campaign complained to Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee that the two reporters would “knock on doors late at night and telephone from the lobby.” Bradlee’s response: “That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard about them in years.”8

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Woodward offered this advice in 2018 to journalism students at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. “We’re not showing up. We’re sitting around doing our work on the Internet. You’ve got to meet people. You’ve got to go out.”9 James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic, says reporting is “the process of learning what you didn’t know before you showed up . . . [T]he logic of reporting is that something additional comes from traveling, asking, listening, seeing.”10 Showing up was what Reema Amin did when she began covering rural Isle of Wight County for the Daily Press in Newport News, Virginia. She was young, of Indian heritage, and from Chicago. The new beat was a culture shock. “The community was largely black and white,” she said. “I’m Indian. I had it in my head that would get in the way, that people wouldn’t want to talk with me.” Looking back, Amin realizes that wasn’t the case at all. People welcomed a reporter who was interested in what was going on in the county, and they were more than happy to talk. “It was all about meeting more people and going to stuff,” Amin said. “That was the key to understanding the community and their issues.”11

 TIPS FROM YOUNGER JOURNALISTS: SOME ODDS AND ENDS Think about your audience. When you’re writing, you’re writing for the guy picking the paper up at the 7-Eleven or at the metro stop on the way to work. You’ve got to respect them and respect their time. Steve Contorno, political editor, Tampa Bay Times Don’t get caught up in the competition even though it’s a competitive industry. If you’re super cutthroat, that will be noticed and that can really isolate you . . . Take care of yourself outside of your career. Take time away from the news cycle and all the craziness that’s going on. Candice Norwood, web producer/ writer, Governing magazine Go for coffee or lunch with sources, make a check-in phone call when you don’t need anything. Unless you make it a priority to

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stay in touch, they forget about you and you forget about them. Then you’ve got to call them in an emergency. You need a strong relationship before you really need them. Katie Foody, Associated Press, Denver Focus on being better rather than necessarily being first with a story. If the story is good, people will read it. Marie Wilson, senior writer, Daily Herald, Arlington Heights, Ill.12

BE SURPRISED AT WHAT YOU FIND Donald Murray, a writer, editor and teacher, said journalists fail when they stop concentrating and let an exciting world pass them by. He believed the best journalists: •• Teach themselves to pay attention to the world in all its details and nuances. •• Notice what is present and what is missing. •• Are alert to what happens as well as to what doesn’t happen. •• Look for surprises and take delight in the unexpected. In a memo to a new features writer, Murray summarized the challenge journalists face as they go about the daily work of gathering information for their stories. Your ability to write well is based on your ability to see well. And we want you on the street, and discovering what is extraordinary in what has become ordinary for the rest of us. We want to know what you catch out of the corner of your eye, what you hear being said and not said, what you discover when you observe the world from your own point of view. We hope you’ll continue to be surprised at what you find and that you’ll continue to surprise us and our readers. You cannot write from nothing, Murray said. Good writing is derived from the building blocks of accurate, revealing details. To find those details, you must go out into the world and be alert to what goes on around you.13

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Use all of your senses: Sight and hearing, certainly, but also touch, smell and taste. Describe the sun setting over a Midwest cornfield or the sounds of an auto factory on its last day of operation. How do you describe the feel of a handsaw as it cuts through wood, the aroma of a bakery, or the peaty taste of a whisky from Islay, Scotland? Think of your brain as a muscle that gets stronger the more you use it. When he was dean of the College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, Thomas Kunkel sent students in his news feature writing class out to the campus mall to write down things they had never noticed before. The students came back with dozens of great story ideas, which Kunkel wrote about for American Journalism Review. It all begins with the reporting, the act of going out to see and hear what’s happening, he said. Nothing – not even raw talent – can substitute for good reporting. “Young reporters often feel that story generation is their biggest challenge. But coming up with a good idea for a news feature doesn’t take magic. It takes paying attention.”14 Unfortunately, many journalists have lost the fresh eyes they need to see what’s going on around them. They talk to the same people, go to the same places, ask the same questions over and over again. Then anticipate nothing out of the ordinary, and they see only what they expect to see. Call it journalistic attention deficit disorder, a condition in which we become blind and deaf to sights and sounds that should astound us. We follow routines and fail to capture unexpected stories and their meanings. We take things for granted, and become such creatures of habit that only spectacular events can snap us out of our preoccupations. Go into the weeds and get lost on side roads. See what’s present and what’s missing. Use the muscles of your brain to detect patterns, connect dots, find explanations and answers and make sense of a world that is complicated and often confusing. Get out of your box, put down your mobile device, and go out into the world and see and hear what’s going on.

Barry Bearak’s first story as a New York Times correspondent in India was about cows in the streets. It was, he said later, the biggest cliché imaginable. Hindus venerate the cow as the giver of life and the symbol of motherhood. Killing cows is illegal in most of India, and they roam freely in the countryside and on city streets, largely unnoticed by residents. Bearak had never seen anything like it before, and all sorts of

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questions popped into his head: Do they belong to anyone? What do they eat? What happens if you hit one with your car? In his search for answers he discovered a subculture he had no idea existed. He talked to municipal workers who rescued cows that were hit by vehicles or faced other dangers. Old and sick cows didn’t put up much of a fight, but a healthy one required eight men to capture it. “If you grab the ears and put your hand in its mouth, the cow won’t run,” a veteran cowcatcher said. “Then someone has to hold on to the tail.” Bearak’s story was picked up by Indian newspapers that had never written about the problem. His fresh eyes recognized a story that many Indians didn’t see, even though it was right in front of them. A good reporter on the ground with a fresh perspective can “see things with the wonderment of someone brand new to a subject,” Bearak said. “After I had been in India for two or three years, I never, never would have done a story like that.”15

KEEP YOUR EYES AND EARS OPEN New York Times reporter Kenneth P. Vogel was at lunch with a source at a Washington, D.C., steak house in September 2017. The weather was pleasant, and they asked for a table in the restaurant’s outdoor section, which abutted a busy sidewalk. Shortly after ordering, the source thought he recognized someone at a table behind Vogel. “Isn’t that the Trump lawyer?” the source asked. Vogel turned slightly and saw Ty Cobb, a veteran lawyer who was coordinating the White House’s response to investigations into Russia’s influence in the 2016 presidential election. Cobb’s prominent handlebar mustache made him recognizable to reporters and to the general public as well. The other person with Cobb turned out to be John Dowd, who was then President Trump’s lead outside lawyer in the Russia investigation. Cobb and Dowd were having a spirited discussion about a dispute in the president’s legal team over how much the White House should cooperate with the investigation. The lawyers were in a public place where anyone could see and overhear them. Vogel had not misrepresented himself, but he was a reporter. So he listened. And took notes on his phone. And discreetly snapped a picture, to make sure he had their identities right. The lawyers discussed strategies as well as the tensions on the president’s legal team. Cobb suggested that he suspected another lawyer on the team of being a “spy” and a “leak.”

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After the pair left, Vogel returned to the Times Washington bureau, which happened to be next door to the restaurant. Vogel and colleague Peter Baker did additional interviews and reporting over the next several days. Their story ran under the headline, “Trump Lawyers Clash Over How Much to Cooperate With Russia Inquiry.” Vogel explained in a column how his reporting started with an overheard conversation. And he quoted an editor’s comment about his story: “It is every Washington reporter’s dream to sit down at a restaurant, overhear secret stuff and get a scoop.”16 Steve Contorno was a new reporter at the Washington Examiner covering Virginia politics and government in early 2012, and he spent a lot of time on Interstate 95 going from D.C. to Richmond, the state capital. One day on his way home, he noticed highway signs saying aircraft were used to enforce speed limits. He wondered how often state police actually used planes to catch speeders. He started asking questions, and it turned out the answer was: Almost never. Even though the signs were on highways all around Virginia, state police used aircraft only five times to enforce speed limits between 2008 and 2011. For one thing, it was really expensive, and the logistics were complicated. Police in the air would track vehicle speeds on the ground and then radio state troopers in cars to catch offending drivers. Many times, when police scheduled flights, they were canceled because of bad weather. Contorno’s story was short but had high readership. He got it “because I kept my eyes open on a new beat and brought a fresh eye to something” that other journalists had never thought to ask about.17 David Farenthold of The Washington Post was in Waterloo, Iowa, covering a 2016 campaign rally for Donald Trump, who was then running for the Republican nomination for president, when the candidate did something unusual. He called two members of a local veterans group up to the stage to give their organization a $100,000 check from Trump’s foundation. Trump said he had raised $6 million, including $1 million from him, a few nights before at a televised fundraiser. The candidate was now giving money away, a little at a time, to charities in towns where he held campaign events. Farenthold knew almost nothing about charities, but he did know Trump couldn’t use his charity to boost his campaign. “By law they have to be separate,” he said. “But then I noticed something else. After he’d done that a few times, giving out big checks to different groups at these rallies, he stopped.” Of the $6 million he’d promised to give away, only about a million could be accounted for.

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Farenthold set out to find out where the rest of the money went. He figured he could get the answer from Trump’s campaign and wrap up a story in a day or two. Instead, he spent nine months trying to get to the bottom of the story. By year’s end, he’d produced a detailed series of stories showing that many of Trump’s philanthropic claims over the years had been exaggerated and often were not truly charitable activities at all. And his reporting about Trump’s philanthropy generated an anonymous tip that led to a story disclosing that, in a 2005 unaired television interview, Trump had bragged about groping women. That became one of the year’s most-read stories and led to calls for Trump to drop out of the race just a couple of weeks before Election Day. Trump didn’t drop out. Farenthold wrote the front-page story about Trump’s victory for the Post’s November 9, 2016, edition. A few days later, a German reporter interviewed Farenthold and asked, “Do you feel like your work perhaps did not matter at all?” “It did matter,” Farenthold wrote in an end-of-the-year article in The Washington Post Magazine about his year covering Trump. But, in an election as long and wild as this, a lot of other stories and other people mattered, too. I did my job. The voters did theirs. Now my job goes on. I’ll seek to cover Trump the president with the same vigor as I scrutinized Trump the candidate. And now I know how to do it. David Farenthold won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of the Trump campaign.18

“GET THIS OUT INTO THE WORLD” Charlottesville, Va., Daily Progress photographer Ryan Kelly’s assignment on August 12, 2017: Cover demonstrations against white nationalists and neo-Nazis who had come to the university town to protest a plan to take down a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Violence had broken out, but shortly after 1 p.m. the white nationalists began to disperse after police declared their rally an illegal assembly. Counter-protesters began to celebrate. Kelly had shot pictures since early morning and was on Fourth Street, where many of the counter-protesters had gathered. He noticed a gray Dodge Challenger that appeared to be backing up. He heard the car’s engine rev, and the vehicle sped past him. He began to shoot again.

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The Challenger crashed into dozens of counter-protesters, then gunned into reverse and backed up the street. Kelly chased the car for a block before losing sight of it. He then began to review what he had photographed. He and an editor who was also covering the rally looked over the images on a laptop. One in particular stood out. “That’s when it really hit me we needed to get this out into the world,” Kelly said. “I knew that was the image.” The image captured the moment the car slammed into the counterprotesters. Shoes, signs, bodies went flying. Kelly’s picture ran on the front page of the Daily Progress the next morning, a Sunday. It ran on network and cable news and made the front page of dozens of other U.S. newspapers as well. Heather Heyer, a paralegal at a Charlottesville law firm, was killed while protesting the white nationalists; she was 32. Nineteen other counter-protesters were injured. An Ohio man was identified as the driver of the Challenger and charged with first-degree murder. He was convicted of that charge and others a year and a half later and was sentenced to life in prison. In February 2018, Kelly’s photo was named the Picture of the Year International for breaking news. In April, he was invited to Amsterdam where he won another award from the World Press Photo Association. He had just gotten off his international flight when he learned that he had won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography. The Pulitzer citation said his image “reflected the photographer’s reflexes and concentration” in capturing the moment of impact. Kelly said that while he appreciated the awards, “The violence was terrible and I’m still heartbroken for the injured, and especially Heather Heyer’s family.” The assignment that Saturday in August 2017 was Kelly’s last as a Daily Progress photographer. Burned out after four years, he took a job as social media manager for a nearby craft brewery. “It’s still hard to look at,” Kelly told The Washington Post a year later. “So much is contained in that moment.”19

CONCLUSION The best reporters know there’s no substitute for walking up steps and knocking on doors, or driving to the scene of an event and talking to people about what happened. There’s no substitute for shoe leather and legwork, for showing up, for being on the streets and prepared when something happens.

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Robert Capa’s maxim for photojournalists applies as well to everything you do as a journalist: If your stories aren’t good enough, you may not have been close enough. The truth is out there. You just have to look for it. Pay attention, and you will find things that will surprise you and your readers. Get close to your stories, and discover the extraordinary parts of life that others miss.

 CHECKLIST •• Get up and go. Some stories may drop into your lap, but the best ones will be those you find for yourself. •• Set a goal of spending at least half your workday on the street or in the field. You can’t do all of your work in the field, but the more you’re out there, the richer your stories will be. •• Talk to people in person whenever you can. It takes more time, and it may not always be possible when you’re working on a tight deadline. Use the phone when necessary and e-mail only sparingly. •• Use the Internet and social media to supplement, not replace, your on-the-scene reporting. You can learn a lot of valuable information in cyberspace and find sources through social media. But don’t spend all your reporting time plugged into your devices. •• Walk to places. Occasionally take public transportation. Eat lunch and drink coffee at places where people congregate. Pay attention to the people around you to learn what they’re talking about and what’s on their minds. •• Open your eyes. What does the school superintendent have on his walls and desk? What’s in the refrigerator of the working-class single mom trying to make ends meet for her kids? What books and magazines does the political candidate keep in his home? •• Open your ears. What do you hear in the halls of the high school as you report on what goes on in the classroom? What do the people who are waiting for news about an injured relative in a hospital emergency room say about him? •• Change your habits. Take a different route to school or work. Note things that you’ve never seen before. Break habits that can blind you to exceptional things happening around you. •• Challenge your assumptions. You may think you know what life is like in a particular part of your community. Go there and see if your assumptions match reality. •• Do new things. Visit places you’ve never been before. Talk to new people. Get lost and ask for directions. You never know what you’ll discover when you ask for help.

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 ASSIGNMENT Complete the exercise that Thomas Kunkel assigned his students at Maryland. Spend an hour or two wandering around your campus or another familiar public space with your notebook and camera. Note people or things that you’ve never really seen before, that are simply different, interesting or surprising. How many new impressions can you come away with? How many could you turn into a story? What does this exercise tell you about your powers of observation when you’re operating in your normal mode? What can you do differently to become more attentive to your surroundings and the people around you?

  OTHER RESOURCES The Pulitzer Prize organization has posted winners of the breaking news photography category since 2000 on its website at www. pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/216. Many of the photos are from war zones and depict, like Ryan Kelly’s picture from Charlottesville, disturbing images. But they all represent work that, like Robert Capa’s, displays the importance of getting close to a story. (Before 2000, the category was called spot news photography. Some of those older photos are also on the website.) Jimmy Breslin wrote a Sunday column for the New York Daily News until his death in 2017 at age 86. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1986, and you can read one of the columns in his prize-winning entry at www.pulitzer.org/article/jimmy-breslinchampion-ordinary-citizens. The link also contains the 2013 CUNY TV interview with Breslin. Listen to it for some insights into his reporting methods.

NOTES 1 Robert Capa, Slightly Out of Focus, The Modern Library, 1999; Alex Kershaw, Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa, St. Martin’s, 2003; Marie Brenner, “Robert Capa’s Longest Day,” Vanity Fair, May 2014. 2 David Carr, Commencement Address at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism, February 15, 2015. 3 Haynes Johnson, Nieman Reports, summer 1995. 4 Claudia Dreifus, “‘Studies in Power’: An Interview with Robert Caro,” nybooks.com, January 16, 2018. Also see Robert Caro, “Turn Every

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Page: A Cub Reporter, an Old-Timer’s Advice, and a Lifetime of Learning Secrets,” The New Yorker, January 28, 2019. 5 David Nyhan, “Jimmy Breslin: The Bard of Queens,” Washington Journalism Review, October 1986; Jimmy Breslin, “Digging JFK Grave Was His Honor,” New York Herald Tribune, November 1963. 6 “Irish Writers in America: Breslin on Breslin,” CUNY TV, June 10, 2013, www.cuny.tv/show/irishwriters/PR2001887. 7 Monica Davey interview, January 12, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. 8 Benjamin Mullin, “Read Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s Remarks to the White House Correspondents’ Association,” poynter.org, April 30, 2017. 9 Justin Mattingly, “Bob Woodward, Speaking at VCU, on Trump White House: ‘There is a War on Truth’,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 26, 2018. 10 James Fallows, “Reinventing America,” The Atlantic, May 2018. 11 Reema Amin interview, June 27, 2018. 12 Interviews with: Steve Contorno, June 21, 2018; Candice Norwood, June 9, 2018; Katie Foody, June 16, 2018; Marie Wilson, June 12, 2018. 13 Donald M. Murray, Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work, Heinemann, 2000, pp. 4–6; Murray, “Memo to a New Feature Writer,” in The Complete Book of Feature Writing, ed. Leonard Witt, Writer’s Digest Books, 1991, p. 15. 14 Thomas Kunkel, “Dear JOUR371,” American Journalism Review, February–March 2005. 15 Interview with Barry Bearak, February 13, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition; Barry Bearak, “Sacred Cows Are Wily, Too; Just Try Catching One,” The New York Times, October 21, 1998. 16 Kenneth P. Vogel, “‘Isn’t That the Trump Lawyer?’ A Reporter’s Accidental Scoop,” The New York Times, October 6, 2017; Peter Baker and Kenneth P. Vogel, “Trump Lawyers Clash Over How Much to Cooperate With Russia Inquiry,” The New York Times, September 17, 2017. 17 Contorno interview, June 21, 2018. 18 David Fahrenthold, “David Fahrenthold Tells the Behind-The-Scenes Story of His Year Covering Trump,” The Washington Post, December 29, 2016. Fahrenthold’s prize-winning stories can found at www.pulitzer.org/ winners/david-fahrenthold. 19 Steve Hendrix, “It’s Still Hard to Look At,” The Washington Post, August 10, 2018; “Former Progress Photographer Wins Pulitzer Prize for Aug. 12 Coverage,” The Daily Progress, April 16, 2018. You can see Kelly’s photo at www.pulitzer.org/winners/ryan-kelly-daily-progress.

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Tom and Pat Gish had nearly 20 years of news experience between them when, in 1956, they bought The Mountain Eagle, a weekly paper in eastern Kentucky’s Letcher County. Tom grew up in a Letcher County coal camp and read the paper as a child. A weekly, it avoided hard reporting and controversies; its motto was “A Friendly Non-Partisan Weekly Newspaper Published Every Thursday.” The Gishes changed all that. They discovered the Eagle’s motto had once been “It Screams!” They restored that phrase to the masthead and launched a half-century of hard-nosed reporting that may be unequaled in the annals of small-town weeklies. They challenged secrecy and corruption in local government and were among the first to write about environmental problems caused by strip mining. They told readers about deplorable conditions in local schools and about communities that didn’t have adequate public water or sewers. They wrote about unsafe mines and black lung disease and how impoverished citizens in eastern Kentucky’s hollows and mountains coped with hunger and inadequate health care. They criticized banks that charged local residents higher interest rates for mortgages than were charged in other parts of the state, and they reported how coal company trucks wrecked mountain roads. The Gishes developed enemies. Government agencies declared their offices and meetings off limits to Eagle reporters. A school board chairman told teachers and parents to boycott the paper. The electric company urged businesses to pull their ads because the publishers were communists.

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One morning someone threw a firebomb through a window and destroyed the newspaper office. Tom and Pat set up shop in their home to publish the next issue. The paper’s new motto: “It Still Screams!” More than four decades later, the Gishes marveled at what they didn’t know when they started. “We didn’t know that the coal economy was falling apart,” they wrote in a 2000 essay. We didn’t know that one of every two mountain adults couldn’t read or write. We didn’t know that tens of thousands had been plunged into the extremes of poverty, with children and adults suffering from hunger and some dying of starvation.1 But they learned, and they came to understand and love the place they called home and the people who lived there. And they treasured the stories chronicling everyday happenings of their region: The births, deaths, marriages, graduations and homecomings, even the bounty of local vegetable gardens. Some residents still opposed how the Eagle reported the news, but others depended on it and complained if the paper didn’t cover a meeting. “Don’t think you know more than the people who read the Eagle because you don’t,” Tom told new reporters. “Eagle subscribers are as smart as anybody in the country.” The Gishes required reporters who came from outside the region to learn as much as they could about daily life in Letcher County. That could mean going to square dances and other local events; it was the only way they’d get to know the place they covered.2

You may find it hard to imagine yourself covering a place the way Tom and Pat Gish covered their part of Kentucky. Maybe you grew up in one town and went to school in another state, and now you’re about to enter what could be an especially transient profession. You may have your sights set on a big city like Chicago or New York, but it’s likely you’ll start out in a small or medium-sized community. That’s what happened to A.G. Sulzberger. He’s now the publisher of The New York Times, but his first reporting job was covering the small fishing community of Narragansett, Rhode Island, for the Providence Journal. It was an internship that he took only reluctantly at the insistence of a journalism professor. In Narragansett he wrote slice-of-life stories, covered town council and school board meetings, and called the police chief every morning to find out what happened overnight.

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“The first three months were tough, because the job of the reporter is to explain something to everyone else,” he said. He became aware – like the Gishes – of how much he didn’t know, but said he couldn’t imagine a better way to spend his time. It became, he said, a beautiful combination of spending “half your day talking to people, finding out what’s going on in the world, half your day alone pulling a story out of yourself. I just loved the rhythm of the days.”3 No matter where you begin as a journalist or where you end up, it’s important to develop an intimate knowledge of each community that you cover. You need to learn the geography, of course, but there’s more to it than knowing how to get from one place to another. You must also become familiar with the inner workings of the people who live there. You should strive to learn what makes them tick, what they care about and what motivates them in their daily lives. Treat any new place like an assignment. Your job is to get to know it. This will require discipline, a dedicated approach, respect, and even affection for the community. You must actually care about what happens to the place and its people if you are to report honestly and compassionately. This may sound contrary to what you’ve been told about how to conduct yourself as a journalist. You’ve been taught to avoid conflicts of interest, and even the appearance of a conflict that could cause readers or viewers to question your fairness in reporting a story. But there is a difference between avoiding a conflict of interest and taking an interest in the community you cover. You shouldn’t wear campaign caps or buttons, display bumper stickers, sign political petitions, or participate in demonstrations or social actions that might call into question your ability to report, edit or photograph a story fairly. These measures protect your credibility, but they don’t require you to be indifferent or prevent you from being interested in the places you cover. It’s okay to get out and be a part of the community, says Katie Foody, an Associated Press reporter in Denver. You can’t cover a city or a neighborhood or a state without getting out and exploring it, she says. Go to places where people live, work and play, where they go to worship, where their kids go to school and where they make decisions about governing their lives, and find out what’s important to them.4 Your job is to keep your community informed about what’s going on and to bring context to events. This requires intimate knowledge of the places you cover, and that can happen only if you’re a part of the community. To make your presence felt, you must actually be present. You cannot reflect on something you have not seen firsthand. To know – to understand deeply – the place you serve, you must live in it wholeheartedly.

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You may even need to love it, though that doesn’t mean ignoring its faults or its problems. After Ken Ward Jr. won a 2018 McArthur Foundation “genius” award for his coverage of the impact of energy industries on West Virginia’s environment, he talked about what he saw as his responsibility to the place where he lived. Ward and his wife, a legal aid lawyer, are West Virginia natives. One of the things that drew us together and continues to sustain our family is our shared love for West Virginia and our shared desire to try to do things to make it better. Everything I have West Virginia gave to me, and I think I have a sense of duty to try to give back. The McArthur award, he said, was not supposed to be a parting gift or end-of-career tip of the hat. “They want to encourage people to do more and better things . . . I feel some duty to try to figure out exactly what that is and do it for West Virginia.”5

BUILD A RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR COMMUNITY Al Cross was a long-time political reporter for the Louisville CourierJournal before he became director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. The institute was established in 2004 to help rural journalists around the country “define the public agenda in their communities through strong reporting and commentary.” Most of Cross’s work is directed toward professionals, but he also teaches a community journalism course each semester in which students use multiple platforms to cover a nearby small town. Rural newspapers face many of the problems that have confronted their big-city counterparts, but Cross remains bullish on the state of community journalism. People are always going to need local news, he says, and newspapers are usually the only reliable source in rural communities for those stories. He describes community journalism as relationship journalism. At smaller news operations, he says, you have a closer and more continuing relationship with the people in your stories, your sources and your audience. He cites what Jock Lauterer, director of the Carolina Community Media Project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, calls the Three As of community journalism. At a small news organization you’re more accessible to

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the public. Being more accessible makes you more accountable, and that tends to make you more accurate. Cross says a good newspaper does three things: it informs; it creates a public forum where people can express opinions and ideas and hear new ones; and it leads by forcing its community to face critical issues that need to be dealt with. His tips for producing good community journalism: •• Remember that every place is different. If you’ve lived in one small town, well, you’ve lived in one small town. All places have idiosyncrasies; just when you think you understand a place, it’s liable to prove you wrong. Keep an open mind, and avoid buying into stereotypes. •• Don’t be afraid to develop affection for the place you cover, but practice tough love. Hold up a mirror to the community. •• Don’t just be against something; find causes to support. Look for good things that happen as well as things that need correcting. •• Treat people like human beings. (We’ll talk more about this in Chapter 14.)6 Cross’s specific focus is on rural journalism, but his advice can help you produce good journalism in suburbs and small and big cities as well. Everything depends on the relationships you form with individuals in the community and how well you pay attention to what they tell you. The stronger the relationship, the greater the trust between you and the community, all of which will help make your reporting more authoritative.

 TIPS FROM YOUNGER JOURNALISTS: YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW No matter how much schooling you get or how many Columbia Journalism Review think pieces you read, you don’t know anything until you start working for a newspaper or a news organization. Everything is different, every beat is different, all the characters are different. You may have all the tools, but don’t approach anything like you know what you’re doing. Be confident, but be humble. It’s a learning experience. As long as you’re willing to learn and adapt, you can survive. Reema Amin, reporter, Chalkbeat New York

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On an internship experience: I had no idea what I was getting into. I wasn’t the only intern thrown into something they knew nothing about. It was important to pick up things quickly. Immerse yourself quickly in the topic, read books, articles, follow writers at the Wall Street Journal, read more niche publications. Call people and ask what’s going on, who do I need to know, what’s coming up in the next couple of weeks that I need to keep my eye on. Declan Harty, reporter, S&P Global Market Intelligence For all the jobs I’ve had just the minimal amount of experience, just enough to get me in. After doing radio for three months, I really had no idea what I was doing. I remember calling a mentor at NPR around month six and said I don’t think I’m cut out for this field. He said, “Oh, the first year is always difficult. Stick with it.” Emily Siner, news director, Nashville Public Radio7

TALK TO NEIGHBORS, WALK THE BEAT DNAinfo Chicago went live in November 2012, three years after the launch of a similar site in New York. Bankrolled by billionaire entrepreneur Joe Ricketts, the news service promised hyper-local coverage of Chicago that other news media ignored. Its reporters would be embedded in neighborhoods across the city and provide shoe-leather original reporting, instead of aggregating coverage from other outlets. Its for-profit business model would be similarly structured, with neighborhood sales representatives selling advertising. Readers – who got the news for free – loved it. Then, in November 2017, Ricketts closed both operations with no warning, saying the ad-supported business model wasn’t viable. The New York newsroom had voted to unionize a week earlier, and some saw that action as contributing to Ricketts’ decision to shut the doors. Stephanie Lulay joined DNAinfo Chicago as a neighborhood reporter in September 2014 after working four years for a suburban daily that had been wracked by cutbacks and layoffs. The change in atmosphere at DNAinfo was remarkable. Working conditions at the new job were a “total 180,” she said. Pay was decent, she didn’t have

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to commute, and reporters had good equipment and tech support. And the job was exciting. “No story was too small,” she said. Something didn’t have to be a trend story or appeal to the whole city for us to write about it. We were very open to experimentation and seeing what works and what the audience responded to. But so much of what we did was straight-up old school beat reporting. Talk to neighbors. Walk the beat. Going out and doing the story was the fun stuff. When DNAinfo closed, Lulay – by then a senior editor – and several colleagues spent “one night of drinking and being sad. Maybe two nights.” Then they began to hear from upset readers who asked: Why didn’t you ask us to pay for this? That was the catalyst for what came next. Shamus Toomey, DNAinfo’s managing editor, Jen Sabella, deputy editor and director of social media, and Lulay began exploring ways to preserve – and pay for – the kind of journalism they’d produced at DNAinfo. They looked at public radio’s model of asking listeners for financial support. They also talked to Civil, a blockchain-based platform that was helping hyper-local newsrooms start up around the country. Civil promised financial and technical support and – importantly – a hands-off approach to the journalism. In February 2018 Toomey, Sabella and Lulay launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for Block Club Chicago, which would have the same local journalism mission as DNAinfo but would be a nonprofit, ad-free, subscription-based digital operation. Their goal: $25,000. In one month they raised $183,000, a Kickstarter record for a local journalism campaign. Block Club Chicago launched in June 2018 with the three founding editors, six full-time neighborhood-based reporters and a cadre of freelancers. The initial subscription rate was $6 a month or $59 a year. Lulay said several thousand subscribers signed up in the first four months, and local foundations also expressed interest in offering financial support. Journalism was the easy part: The three editors were also responsible for human resources, grant-writing, picking out benefits – things they didn’t have to worry about in their old jobs. But they were taking care of the local journalism that Chicago residents needed – and were willing to pay for. The business models for journalism have changed and will continue to change, Lulay said, and it’s important for young journalists

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to study and understand the economic challenges of the business. But the fundamentals of journalism and what people want from journalism haven’t changed. She’s still a fan of daily newspapers, but they don’t cover neighborhoods like Block Club Chicago promised. Most people in the neighborhoods never met a local reporter before, and they wanted to know things like what their alderman was up to. “Those are the gaps we’re trying to fill,” Lulay said. “Readers have a hunger for it.”8

Block Club Chicago is one of many non-partisan and nonprofit news organizations working to fill gaps in local news – and, in some cases, state and national news – caused by cutbacks at traditional organizations. Block Club is a member of The Institute for Nonprofit News (inn.org; INN), which grew out of a meeting of journalists from nonprofits who were concerned about the future of investigative journalism at a time when for-profits were slashing staff and resources. The INN’s mission is to create a community where nonprofits can pool resources and collaborate, share best practices, and provide training. Some organizations involved from the beginning are Minnpost.com, voiceofsandiego.org, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, the Center for Investigative Reporting and The Texas Observer. Among the organizations that joined the same year as Block Club Chicago: The Arkansas Nonprofit News Network; the Nevada Independent; Insider Louisville; The Alhambra Source, which covers a multiethnic Los Angeles suburb; and The Forward, which covers issues and ideas of concern to American Jews. By mid2019, more than 200 news organizations belonged to INN.

KEEP AN EYE ON THE WORLD The journalist’s primary role is to give citizens the news and information they need to make wise political, economic and social decisions that will affect their lives, and the focus is often very local. But you should not ignore what’s going on in the rest of the world. What happens around the world affects people in every local community. Unfortunately, many young people in the United States have little knowledge about world geography, the environment, demographics, U.S. foreign policy, recent international events or economics.

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In 2016, the National Geographic Society and the Council on Foreign Relations commissioned a survey to find out what young people educated in American colleges and universities knew about those topics. The survey polled 1,203 people, ages 18 to 26, who were currently attending or had recently attended a U.S. college or university, both two-year and four-year institutions. The results showed a significant gap in young people’s understanding of the world. On knowledge questions, the average was 55 percent correct. Only 29 percent of respondents earned a score of 66 percent correct or better. Only 17 of all the students surveyed earned an A, 91 percent or higher. The 2016 survey mirrored the results of a 2006 survey by National Geographic and Roper Public Affairs. In that survey, 63 percent of people ages 18 to 24 could not locate Iraq or Saudi Arabia on a map, and 75 percent couldn’t find Iran or Israel. More than half did not know that Sudan and Rwanda are in Africa, and 70 percent could not find North Korea. There were encouraging findings in the 2016 survey. A majority of respondents said it was important to be knowledgeable about world geography and history, foreign cultures and international events. Seventy-eight percent knew that fossil fuels are a nonrenewable resource. But only 30 percent knew that the constitutional power to declare war rests with the legislative branch of the U.S. government. Nearly half (48 percent) placed it in the executive branch.9 Ted Gup, journalism department chair at Emerson College and an award-winning author, said he was “dumbstruck” when he quizzed his journalism students at another school about current events. He was chagrined that they couldn’t answer even the simplest questions about world history and international events, and he saw their lack of knowledge as a serious threat to society. How, he wondered, could one reconcile their ignorance with the idea that they were part of the Internet information age? He said the American education system needed to reinstate civics and current events into its curriculum. Otherwise, he said, an entire generation would be “left behind and left out.” “As a nation, we spend an inordinate amount of time fretting about illegal immigration and painfully little on what it means to be a citizen, beyond the legal status conferred by accident of birth or public processing,” Gup wrote. We are too busy building a wall around us to notice that we are shutting ourselves in. Intent on exporting democracy – spending

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blood and billions in pursuit of it abroad – we have shown a decided lack of interest in exercising or promoting democracy at home.10 Gup sounded that alarm in 2008. More than a decade later, have things improved? “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,” English poet John Donne (1572–1631) wrote in his famous Meditation XVII. That’s still true. Despite all its governments, religions and ethnicities, the world is interconnected, even though many insist on remaining separate. As a citizen and a journalist, you must recognize the dangers that isolationism creates for our society and the world. What happens in your community can affect the rest of the world; and what happens elsewhere affects the place you live and write about. Wars in Syria and Yemen may seem distant, but they have impact and importance beyond their borders. Economic and social unrest in Great Britain, Europe and South America can shake our own economy and society. To be responsible as both a journalist and a citizen, you must be informed about what’s going on elsewhere. Get off your island.

CONCLUSION Tom Gish died in 2008 at age 82 of kidney and heart problems. Pat Gish was 87 when she died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease in 2014. The Mountain Eagle is still family-owned. Ben Gish, their son, is editor and publisher. In 2005, the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky established the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism. The first award went – naturally – to the Gishes. Since then, it has gone to community journalists in Iowa, Texas, Oregon, North Carolina, New Mexico, Kentucky, Mississippi, Louisiana and Missouri. The 2017 award went to the Cullen family, who publish the Storm Lake Times in Northwest Iowa. The twice-weekly paper (circulation: 3,000) was recognized for its stories about water pollution that was largely caused by agribusiness. Art Cullen, the editor and co-owner of the paper, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing for his columns about pollution in the Raccoon River, which supplies water for Des Moines, the state capital. Like The Mountain Eagle,

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the paper’s coverage made enemies. State legislators were so angry about the Times’s tough reporting that a resolution congratulating the paper on the Pulitzer didn’t get enough votes to pass. “We’ve lost some friends, we’ve lost subscriptions; for a while, lost some ads,” Art Cullen said.11 The 2018 award went to Les Zaitz, publisher of the Malheur Enterprise (circulation: 1,500) in eastern Oregon, for his paper’s successful legal fight with the state to open public records in the case of a former state hospital patient who was involved in two murders. In accepting the Gish award, Zaitz told other weekly editors that the most important lesson was “to bring your community along as the fight heats up. Let them know that we’re not doing it for journalistic prizes . . . tell the reader, ‘we’re doing this for you, this is information you deserve’.” He said In the current environment, what we do has become so important that our societies are turning to local news as, frankly, the only news that they can trust. They know you, they know your organizations, so you need to help build that trust, and build on that trust to give . . . some refuge from the storm of fake news. People are feeling whiplashed.12

 CHECKLIST •• Learn your territory. Go to places where people congregate – coffee shops, bars, barbershops, hair salons. Go to houses of worship. Remember the importance of shoe leather, shoe leather, shoe leather. •• Do your research. Study the history of your community and its people, using as many sources as you can find. Go to a library and get to know people who work there. They want to get information out to the public just like you do. •• Get to know the people. Find and talk to individuals who are plugged into community and neighborhood networks. Talk with them in their settings and listen to what they say. Look for diversity – ethnic, racial, social, economic, ideological, religious – in the people you talk with. •• Remember that stories happen in places. Your stories should have a sense of a particular place and a particular time. Settings can be important. Place – the where of the 5 Ws – can often be a character.

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•• Talk to the person who covered the community before you. Ask for advice and tips. Which sources were reliable and trustworthy, and who were problematic? •• Show respect. The people of your community are a lot smarter than you may think they are. Learn from them. Don’t pretend to know more than you do.

 ASSIGNMENT It’s important that you follow the suggestions in the checklist to learn about the place that you cover. But you should also test your knowledge of what’s going on in the rest of the world as well. International news may be hard to find; newspapers devote little space to it, and networks and cable news shows have also cut back on foreign reporting, though CNN has an international presence and NPR devotes significant time to international stories. As part of the test, rate your general knowledge of the world on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (highest). Then choose a news source you haven’t read before that includes strong international coverage (such as the BBC, The New York Times or The Economist). Read it for at least a week, but longer if possible. Then answer these questions: 1. How would you rate your world knowledge now? 2. Which area of the world have you learned the most about? How does what you’ve learned change or affect your views about the world? 3. Do you see a change in what you notice when you read your regular news sources?

  OTHER RESOURCES You may not be familiar with the term news desert, but you should be. It’s a description of a community that has lost its source of local news – usually its newspaper – and the risks to the community as a result of that loss. Two studies have looked at this phenomenon in recent years. The Rise of the New Media Baron and the Emerging Threat of News Deserts was published in 2016 by the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A second report, Assessing Local Journalism: News Deserts, Journalism Divides, and the Determinants of the Robustness of Local News was published in 2018 by the Sanford School of Public Policy and the DeWitt

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Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University. You can easily find and download each study. Both are worth reading to get an understanding of what’s happened in small and medium-size news markets around the country, and what those changes mean for news literacy and for democracy.

NOTES 1 Tom Gish and Pat Gish essay in The Business of Journalism: 10 Leading Reporters and Editors on the Perils and Pitfalls of the Press, ed. William Serrin, New Press, 2000; Rudy Abramson, “Publishers of Mountain Eagle Get Award Named For Them,” RuralJournalism.org; “Editor and Publisher: Pat and Tom Gish” chapter in Studs Terkel’s American Dreams: Lost and Found, 1980; Interview with Ben Gish, February 15, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. 2 “Tom Gish, Newspaperman” and “Tom Gish Remembered,” The Mountain Eagle, November 26, 2008; R.G. Dunlop, “Crusading Publisher Tom Gish Dies at 82,” The Courier-Journal, November 22, 2008. 3 David Remnick, “Conversation with A.G. Sulzberger, New Leader of The New York Times,” December 22, 2017, newyorker.com. 4 Katie Foody interview, June 16, 2018. 5 Kristen Hare, “‘I Can’t Really Think of a More Important Job’ MacArthur Fellow Says of Staying in Local News,” poynter.org, October 10, 2018. 6 Interview with Al Cross, August 23, 2018. 7 Interviews with: Reema Amin, June 27, 2018; Declan Harty, July 2, 2018; Emily Siner, June 24, 2018. 8 Stephanie Lulay interview, June 29, 2018; Lynne Marek, “DNAinfo Chicago Shuts Down,” Crain’s Chicago Business, November 2, 2017; Christine Schmidt, “DNAinfo Chicago Will be Reborn as Block Club Chicago, Relying on Blockchain and Subscriptions Instead of Billionaires,” NiemanLab, February 8, 2018; Julia Waldow, “These Three Startups Are Here to Save Local News in Their Communities,” CNNMoney, September 30, 2018. 9 Council on Foreign Relations and National Geographic, What CollegeAge Students Know About the World: A Survey on Global Literacy, September 2016; Becky Little, “Most Young Americans Can’t Pass a Test on Global Affairs—Can You?” nationalgeographic.com, September 13, 2016; “Final Report: The National Geographic/Roper Public Affairs 2006 Geographic Literacy Study,” 2006. 10 Ted Gup, “So Much for the Information Age,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 11, 2008. 11 Al Cross, “Iowa Family Wins Tom and Pat Gish Award for Courage, Tenacity and Integrity in Rural Journalism,” uknow.uky.edu, December 22, 2017. 12 Al Cross, “Gish Award Winner Says his Work in E. Oregon has Lessons for Rural Weekly Newspapers and the Rest of the News Media,” The Rural Blog, July 13, 2018.

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The big story in the December 14, 2012, edition of the Newtown Bee was about cemetery vandalism. Other stories dealt with financial problems in the local school system as well as a report about how well the schools were meeting state standards. That Friday morning was supposed to kick off a day of celebration at the Connecticut weekly. A staffer had won an award, and the paper had also won a catered Christmas party in a radio station’s holiday contest. Then Editor Curtiss Clark heard traffic on the police scanner that something was going on at Sandy Hook Elementary School, just a couple of miles from the newspaper. Gunfire was reported, and emergency responders were on their way to the school. Reporter and photographer Shannon Hicks heard the transmission and headed out. She figured it was a false alarm. It wasn’t. At about 9:40 a.m., a 20-year-old man armed with a semi-automatic rifle shot his way into the school and opened fire. His rampage lasted just minutes; it ended after police arrived and the man shot and killed himself. Hicks saw a young officer come out of the school carrying a child’s limp body. Minutes later, other officers led a string of children out of the building, their hands on the shoulders or shirts of the student in front of them. They had been instructed to keep their eyes closed as they were led through a hallway and past the bodies of two school staffers. Hicks took the picture, and then she went to where fire and rescue workers were setting up a triage area. As a photojournalist, she had seen firefighters in action and been impressed, so five years earlier she joined the volunteer department. Now she wanted to help in any way she could. Other Bee staffers hurried to the school. John Voket, the government reporter, went to the nearby firehouse where survivors were gathering.

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He got phone calls from parents who told him what their children were wearing and asked him to look for them. He talked with police officers, all of whom he knew by name; one told him they were preparing for as many as 60 victims. As news about what had happened began to spread, journalists from around the country made their way to Newtown. The Bee’s small staff put their reports on their website, which crashed several times because of the traffic surge until the paper was able to increase its bandwidth. Working around the clock, Bee reporters and editors used Facebook and Twitter to tell local readers the latest news and to give them information about school lockdowns, traffic and grief counseling. On Monday, December 17, the Bee published a free ten-page special edition about the killings, the victims, and the response from the nation and the world. Hicks’s picture of the students being led out of the school was stripped across the front page, the same way it was displayed in many other newspapers over the weekend. Clark, the editor, explained afterward what the Bee’s mission had been throughout its 135 years of publication. “People come to expect that no event, really, is too small for us to cover. If there’s something odd in the neighborhood . . . they’ll call us and suggest we cover it.” The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, though, was something no one could have imagined. The paper, Clark said, was “in new territory, that we had never been in before, and hopefully will never be in again.” Twenty schoolchildren, all of them six- or seven-year-olds, were killed. Four teachers, the school’s principal and a school psychologist – all women – were also killed. The gunman had earlier killed his mother in their home. At the time, it was the second largest mass killing in U.S. history.1

As a journalist, you will go to work most days with an idea about how you’ll spend your time. An editor may have given you an assignment. You may have a meeting or an event to cover. Maybe you have interviews lined up for a feature story you’re working on. Or you might spend the day talking to sources on your beat to see what’s new. By day’s end, you may have written a story or two, or simply made headway on a future piece. It will all seem routine. One day it won’t be. The reporters at the Bee found themselves in new territory when the killer entered Sandy Hook Elementary School. Reporters in Boston were covering the 117th running of that city’s marathon in April 2013 when two bombs detonated near the finish line. Most editors and reporters at the Charleston, South

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Carolina, Post and Courier were at home on a Wednesday night in 2015 when they learned that church members had been shot and killed during Bible study at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Sometimes the unexpected comes in the form of a natural disaster. Reporters who had covered previous wildfires in northern California found themselves in an unimaginable situation when the Camp Fire broke out in November 2018. It burned for more than two weeks and was the state’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire, killing at least 85 residents and destroying more than 18,000 structures. Later that same month, journalists in Alaska hid under their desks when a powerful 7.0 earthquake struck. Then they headed out to report on the aftermath of the quake around the state. Journalists at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans had covered hurricanes before, but in 2005 Katrina – at the time the worst natural disaster in U.S. history – flooded their building and shut down the presses; they set up a satellite newsroom and for several days produced digital-only editions. When papers were finally printed, staffers took copies to the Convention Center and Superdome and handed them out to survivors who were desperate for news updates.2 Journalists at the Annapolis, Md., Capital Gazette also had to move off-site in July 2018 when a gunman blasted his way into their newsroom with a shotgun and killed five people. Reporters and editors worked on the story from across the street. “I don’t know what else to do except this,” one reporter told The Baltimore Sun.3 Those examples are extraordinary, and you may never find yourself confronted with anything as horrifying or dramatic. But – inevitably – something will happen out of the ordinary, and your routine day will be altered. As a journalist, you must be prepared to deal with it. Unanticipated events will override your plans, and you will have to confront new situations immediately and confidently. It won’t always be chaos, but every day will contain interruptions and require course corrections. You must be ready to move in an entirely new direction at a moment’s notice.

 TIPS FROM YOUNGER JOURNALISTS: A LOT OF YOUR TRAINING IS UP TO YOU Learn new stuff every day. Make each project a learning experience and learn from mistakes. Knowing what worked in the last project makes it easier going forward.

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Not everything can be handed to you. Even in college I was teaching myself a lot of the things about using data. It’s important for young journalists to be self-reliant and able to find answers on their own, and also know who to go to when they can’t find the answers, and not say, “Well, I give up.” Tyler Davis, data editor, The Chronicle of Higher Education Get yourself hard skills. Writing is subjective; one editor can think you’re shitty, another one thinks you’re great. Get exposed to the things you can do with data. Screw social media. Anyone can say they’re good at social media. Learn coding, data analysis, FOIA work, visualization, audio. All these things they can’t take away from you even if they engage in favoritism. Maria Zamudio, immigration reporter, WBEZ Chicago Make yourself as well rounded as you possibly can. Print staffs are getting smaller. You have to learn how to do everything, from shooting photos to compiling videos and coming up with ideas for graphics. It might not be your favorite thing, but practice it as much as you can. You’re probably going to have to do it at some point. You have to be constantly learning how to use new tools, especially when it comes to working with data for investigative stories and learning FOIA techniques . . . Newsrooms are so small and there’s not always much guidance from editors. Now it’s up to journalists to teach themselves a lot of things. It’s totally on the reporter to find out what the digital online tools are. Megan Jones, reporter, Chicago Tribune Media Group Know how to use Microsoft Excel and Access. Learn how to handle data in an efficient way. Talk to other journalists and ask how they do it. Find a way to learn these kinds of skills to make you versatile and a newsroom asset for everyone. Janelle O’Dea, data reporter, St. Louis Post-Dispatch4

PLANNING IS EVERYTHING Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. Dwight D. Eisenhower wasn’t thinking about journalism when he said those words. The 34th

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president of the United States was speaking at a 1957 conference on national defense, and he was drawing on his military experience when, as the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, he was responsible for planning and supervising the D-Day invasion of France. You can plan for an emergency, Eisenhower said, but the very nature of an emergency is that it is unexpected and will happen in ways that surprise you. So the particular plan you devise may not apply, but the planning you put into it – the preparation, the training – does because it steeps you “in the character of the problem that you may one day be called upon to solve.”5 Preparation for the unexpected big story begins with developing the proper skills and attitudes in your everyday work, and that’s an individual responsibility that you must assume. Everything you are now learning about good journalism – the importance of curiosity, accuracy and skepticism; how to ask good questions and develop sources; how critical it is that you get to know and understand your community and its people; understanding that first reports are often wrong; and that you must be patient and check things out carefully – will help prepare you to cover stories that you may never anticipate, that may seem unimaginable, until they happen. Every journalist learns the importance of preparation from hard and sometimes painful experiences. What you learn today may seem small, but it could be just the thing you need when you’re confronted with the emergency you didn’t anticipate. Just as you are advised to prepare a personal emergency kit before a major storm hits, you need to build up a journalistic reserve: •• Study what other journalists have done in crises. Read their stories, watch their videos, listen to their audio. Analyze what worked. Don’t hesitate to adapt a good idea to your circumstances. This isn’t stealing or plagiarism: Take what worked for someone else, change what needs to be changed, and make it your own. •• Get to know the people in your community and work to build relationships and trust with them before the emergency, before the crisis. Reporters at the Post and Courier had such good sources in Charleston that they were able to put together a minute-by-minute reconstruction of what happened at the Emanuel AME church within 24 hours of the shooting.6 It was a classic example of how local reporters, in tune with their community, can outshine the national media. You need to be equally plugged in so you know who to talk to and where to go to find out what happened.

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•• Make a formal checklist of key sources – official and unofficial, both on and off your beat – you’ll need to get in touch with in an emergency. Keep it handy. Stay in touch with old sources and develop new ones; someone you just got to know could be the person you turn to in a crisis. Regularly update all contact information – social media, cell numbers, e-mails – on your mobile devices. Keep a hard copy too; technology is not foolproof. Make backups. •• Pay attention to your colleagues’ sources and the information they uncover. Keep those stories available for quick reference. •• Keep notes from interviews. Something you recently heard or learned on your beat may be key to your later understanding of a complicated issue. Be a packrat when it comes to picking up documents or information sheets at public forums or private settings. Develop a system of filing or spreadsheets that is organized, fast and works for you. •• Get out on the street and outside your comfort zone. A visit to an unfamiliar neighborhood may give you the mental map to find a street you need to get to in a hurry someday. •• Don’t forget mistakes you’ve made in the past. Remembering a previous error can help keep you from making the same one in an emergency. Learn from what happened before. When the massive Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise in Northern California in November 2018, the staffs of the small newspapers in nearby Chico and Oroville called on their experiences from a year earlier when a spillway at the nation’s highest dam failed. Officials feared the dam itself might collapse and send a 30-foot wall of water into downstream communities. More than 180,000 residents were evacuated in that emergency. David Little, editor of the Chico Enterprise-Record and the Mercury-Record in Oroville, said the spillway failure prepared his staff for the fire disaster. Reporters and editors concentrated on the basics, which meant getting essential nuts-and-bolts information out as fast as possible. “We’re doing our job,” Little told CNN. “We feel like that all we can do for the community is try to help people keep informed.” The twice-weekly Paradise Post also fell under Little’s supervision. The paper continued to print, but there was no town left to deliver it to. Instead, staffers took the full press runs to distribute at evacuation centers while constantly updating the newspaper’s website.

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“I know there’s the slogan, a newspaper without a town. Well we have a town! It’s just spread out everywhere,” Post editor Rick Silva told television reporters. We just have to find out where they are, right? We still have a town. We still have the residents of Paradise. . . . They’re just not at their residences right now. So, we find them . . . They’re not just our customers, they’re our neighbors and they’re our friends . . . This has been their newspaper. Our voice is their voice.7

CONCLUSION Many of your days as a journalist will end just as you expected them to: According to plan, by completing an assignment and turning in stories that inform readers, listeners and viewers about what’s going on in the world around them. But even those routine days are going to require you to make adjustments in how you go about your work because, well, news happens. And life is unpredictable. Sometimes those unpredictable stories will have happy endings. Enjoy those moments. You may never cover a major storm, or mass shooting, or cyclonic fire. With luck you will never have to write about a terrorist attack or interview survivors of an assault by someone with a semi-automatic weapon. Or talk to people who have lost a friend or family member to violence or an accident. But you must understand that at some point you will have to write about a disturbing event that you could never have imagined. When this happens you must think through your options and contingency plans clearly and calmly. Remember that your first responsibility is to accuracy. Don’t take shortcuts that might imperil your ability to get the facts right. Use social media to find people and sources, but be careful with the information that you share. Don’t share information if you’re not sure it’s accurate or if you’re not confident of the source. Marshal all of your education, training and experience to assess the situation and act appropriately. As a journalist, you must be able to make as much sense as possible of what might seem incomprehensible, and you must be able to present a fair, accurate and contextual account to your readers and viewers. Be prepared. The public counts on you to tell them what they need to know during an emergency or crisis. Don’t let them down.

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 CHECKLIST •• Check things out. Remember that first reports are often wrong. Your job is to verify information before you pass it along to the public. •• Know your community. Chapter 9 dealt with the importance of understanding the place that you cover. Learn where to go and who to talk to before the unexpected happens. Develop sources before the emergency; it may not be possible afterward. And when the crisis does occur, get out there and find out what’s going on. Get as close to the story as you can and pull together the details that will help readers understand the magnitude of what has happened. •• Stay calm even when the world around you is going crazy. A newsroom covering a crisis can be a madhouse, with lots of people giving directions, some of them contradictory. Remember what flight attendants say before the plane takes off: In an emergency, put your oxygen mask on first before you help anyone else. Use your own figurative oxygen mask in an emergency by taking a deep breath and collecting your wits. •• Think through how you should deal with the people you come in contact with. Your job is to get the story, but you have a responsibility to treat everyone you meet with dignity and respect. Many stories were told of journalists who were insensitive or manipulative of residents and family members traumatized by the Sandy Hook killings. We’ll talk more about this in Chapter 14, but the basic rule is simple: Don’t be an asshole. •• Take care of yourself. Be enterprising, but don’t be stupid. Use common sense if you’re in a situation that could turn dangerous. And pay attention to your own emotions, feelings and safety. You likely will sympathize with those who suffered losses. The full impact may not hit you until later. Adrenaline will carry you only so far; at some point you need to stop and rest. Seek counseling if needed. •• Be professional, but remember that your needs as a journalist should not be your only concern. You’re also a citizen, with responsibilities to your community. Saving people, setting up shelters and organizing relief operations may be priorities for your crisis. Report, but don’t get in the way. •• Be disciplined and practice, practice, practice. You may be abundantly talented, but talent will do you little good if you

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haven’t exercised and honed your skills. Learn something new every day, and use it. Practice always beats talent when talent doesn’t practice. •• Don’t panic when something goes wrong, because it will. And don’t be afraid to ask for help. CNN senior producer Christina Zdanowicz was covering the March for Science on a rainy, cold day in Washington, D.C., when her audio recorder stopped working. Fearing she’d lost all her interviews, she sent a message back to the newsroom, and a colleague told her what to do: Use a hair-dryer to lightly blow-dry the recorder. She did. It worked.8

 ASSIGNMENT 1. People who live where natural disasters frequently strike are advised to assemble emergency preparedness kits that include first aid supplies, non-perishable food and water, batteries and sturdy shoes. Draw up a list of items for a kit that will help you cover a story in a crisis. Ask: a. What kind of clothes and shoes should you pack? b. What reporting supplies will you need? Notebooks, for sure, but how many and what kinds of pens or pencils should you have? (Pens don’t always work when the temperature gets below freezing.) c. What about a backup power source for your mobile devices? d. Will you need maps of your community? e. How will you get in touch with your sources and contacts? f. What else should go into your emergency kit? 2. Once you’ve made your list, put you kit together. Have it ready in an easily accessible place so you can grab it and go if and when the time comes.

  OTHER RESOURCES The Times-Picayune in New Orleans won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage and shared the Pulitzer for Public Service with the Sun-Herald of Biloxi-Gulfport for coverage of Hurricane Katrina. The paper put together an instructive video about how its journalists went about their jobs during the storm and its aftermath: www.nola.com/ katrina/index.ssf/2015/08/come_hell_or_high_water_the_ti.html.

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You have probably seen or read coverage of the Sandy Hook killings by major newspapers and broadcast and cable networks. Spend some time reviewing how the hometown Newtown Bee handled the story in its special edition: https://issuu.com/newtownbee/ docs/newtown_bee_special_edition. In the aftermath of the 2018 California wildfires, Columbia Journalism Review editor Kyle Pope and Jill Geisler, an expert in management and leadership, discussed how newsroom leaders should prepare for disaster coverage. You may not be a newsroom leader yet, but you can still learn from their discussion: https://www.cjr.org/ analysis/managers-prepare-for-disaster.php.

NOTES 1 Julie Moos, “How The Newtown Bee is Covering Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting,” poynter.org, December 15, 2012; Neena Satija, “At the Newtown Bee: Reporting, While Grieving,” The CT Mirror, December 21, 2012; Rachel Aviv, “Letter From Newtown: A Community Newspaper Covers a National Tragedy,” The New Yorker, March 4, 2013. 2 The Times-Picayune won two Pulitzers for breaking news and public service for its coverage of Katrina. The entries can be seen at www.pulitzer. org/prize-winners-by-year/2006. 3 Tim Prudente and Scott Dance, “‘I Don’t Know What Else to Do’: Grieving Capital Gazette Journalists Cover the Massacre of Their Own Newsroom,” The Baltimore Sun, June 29, 2018. 4 Interviews with: Maria Zamudio, June 16, 2018; Tyler Davis, June 17, 2018; Megan Jones, July 16, 2018; Janelle O’Dea, June 30, 2018. 5 1958, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957, Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, Remarks at the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference, date: November 14, 1957, https://babel.hathitrust. org/cgi/pt?id=miua.4728417.1957.001;view=1up;seq=858. 6 Jennifer Berry Hawes and Douglas Pardue, “In an Hour, a Church Changes Forever,” The Post and Courier, June 18, 2015. 7 Benjamin Oreskes, “As City Burns Around It, a Newspaper Staff Rises to Cover Unspeakable Tragedy,” Los Angeles Times, November 15, 2018; David Beard, “A Haunted Staff Covers the ‘Unimaginable,’ Months After a Giant Fire Ravaged its Community,” poynter.org, November 16, 2018; “How Local Reporters are Covering the Camp Fire,” CNNBusiness, November 18, 2018, www.cnn.com/videos/business/2018/11/18/how-localreporters-are-covering-the-camp-fire-rs.cnn. 8 Christina Zdanowicz interview, July 20, 2018.

11 Shine a Light Madeline Adams Tate was one of Roanoke, Virginia’s invisible people. She lived in a ramshackle house a few blocks from City Hall and walked to day jobs as a housecleaner. She and George Williams lived together, and they paid $50 a month for a house with no electricity and a wood stove as their only source of heat. When they went to sleep one night in January 1985, Tate lay beside the stove to keep warm. Sometime during the night the fire went out. Outside, the temperature dropped to eleven below zero, making it the coldest night in the city since 1912. The next morning, Williams’ relatives called police when no one answered the door at the house. Inside, water pipes had burst and the water that spewed out had frozen. Williams had suffered frostbite. Tate was on the floor beside the stove, wearing a red and gray dress, two floral print blouses, a blue sweater, a red bathrobe and black boots. She had frozen to death. She was 76 years old. Tate was buried in a pauper’s cemetery. A chaplain, who didn’t know Tate, read a verse from Psalms: “It’s better to rely in the Lord than put any trust in flesh.” Reporter Douglas Pardue described the service: A few minutes was all it took . . . The funeral home people lowered the pine casket into the ground, got back in the hearse and drove away. Wayne Harris started his faded red International tractor and, as gently as the tractor could, packed dirt into the grave. After he built a small mound, Harris turned off the motor, got down on his knees and placed a few flowers on the pile of dirt.

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He also dug a hole for a small concrete marker. No name was on the marker, just the number 978 for the 978th person buried in Coyner Springs Cemetery, the cemetery Roanoke provides for the poor . . . No. 978 had a name: Madeline Adams Tate. A spokeswoman for the business that owned the house where Tate died offered her regrets, but said the company required renters to provide their own heat. City officials said they tried to help people who didn’t have heat, but they had not been alerted to Tate’s situation. In the end, the city picked up the $255 cost of her funeral. Tate’s death provoked The Roanoke Times to begin a yearlong campaign of reporting about housing conditions in the city. Pardue documented the number of substandard houses in the city – some 1,200 – and interviewed the owners of the houses and the people who lived in them. Residents told him about the lack of heat and adequate plumbing that endangered the lives of children and adults already living on the edge.1 Some citizens considered Tate’s story an anomaly, but the newspaper’s investigation opened eyes. Few ever visited the inner-city neighborhoods where many of the community’s poorest and most desperate residents lived. Other residents rarely saw the rotting houses that were infested with rats and lacked hot water and electricity. They certainly never saw or heard the stories of the people who lived in those houses and worked in those neighborhoods. Their problems were invisible to most of society.

Author Studs Terkel called people like Tate the “et ceteras of the world” – people who were left out – and he spent much of his career listening to them and telling their stories in oral histories chronicling life in 20th century America.2 Unfortunately, many news organizations in the 21st century have drastically reduced reporting staffs and resources, and they no longer make it a priority to give voice to the voiceless and to speak for the disenfranchised. After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author David K. Shipler criticized news organizations for failing to cover poverty unless they were prompted by a catastrophe or a new government report or program. The surprise most Americans felt at seeing the poverty in New Orleans after Katrina was an indictment of reporters and editors around the country, Shipler wrote.

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In an open society, nobody who had been watching television or reading newspapers should have been surprised by what Katrina ‘revealed,’ to use the word so widely uttered in the aftermath. The fissures of race and class should be ‘revealed’ every day by America’s free press. Why aren’t they? Journalists, Shipler said, fall into the trap of covering only what government does instead of what government doesn’t do. When government and society at large neglect problems like the conditions in New Orleans, the problems receive little attention until disaster strikes. If reporters spent a week at job training centers, legal aid offices and housing agencies, Shipler said, they’d find more powerful stories than they could write in a month, “not about the programs themselves . . . but about the problems the programs aim to solve.” No problem, Shipler said, is cured until light shines on it for all to see.3 Anne Hull talked about shining light on society’s problems when Colby College in Maine gave her the 2008 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism for her reporting at The Washington Post about Americans living on the margins. Hull, who won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for stories about how veterans were neglected at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., said she aspired to be a journalist who could “shine a light into the eyes of someone who wishes to look away” to reveal the life of the poor and the powerless. Those were the people she wanted to write about, not the powerful or the rich. “There are two kinds of journalism,” Hull said. There’s journalism that is very important and holds the government accountable and holds powerful institutions accountable for what they’re doing. But there’s the other side of it, and that is writing about the little guy who is on the receiving end of this vise and is being neglected and forgotten. That’s the kind of journalism that I tend to do, and that’s the telescope I look through when I’m out reporting stories. Hull drew inspiration from journalist and author James Agee, who chronicled the lives of Southern sharecroppers during the Great Depression. Unfortunately, Hull said, Agee’s kind of reporting was on the wane. In its place she saw bloggers and tweeters, working from coffee shops and never visiting places that had no electricity or

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running water. Newsroom cutbacks made coverage of the fringes of society increasingly rare, she said. “One of the casualties in the smaller newsrooms is covering poor people in this country,” Hull said. “And coverage of class has dropped off the radar.”4

FOCUS ON PEOPLE, NOT INSTITUTIONS You may be responsible for covering government, business, police and courts, but don’t always write from an institution’s perspective. Look harder at how institutions influence people’s lives, and ask questions from the point of view of those affected by what’s taking place: •• What will this institution’s actions mean for the people of this community or neighborhood? •• Who will benefit? •• Who will be harmed? •• Are those without power or influence being heard, or are they shut out of the process? •• For those who are shut out, how can you make sure their voices are heard? Journalists must shine a light to help citizens understand aspects of their communities that they’re unfamiliar with. A person may have strong opinions about issues – undocumented immigrants, health care choices and availability, opioid addiction – but those opinions may not always be grounded in facts. Citizens cannot make informed decisions about public policy matters until they understand how those choices will affect themselves and others. The journalist’s job is to tell stories about those issues in human terms: Who are the real people involved, and how do policy changes or institutional actions or non-actions affect them? What are their lives really like? How are their lives different from and similar to the lives of others in the community? What stakes do they have in the community at large? The answers you find may not always be popular. Many people don’t want to read or hear about those who are different in terms of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical ability or nationality. But you have a responsibility as a journalist to present stories that show your community as it really is, not as some might wish it to be.

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And your decisions about covering a story should be driven by journalistic values, not by a desire to be politically correct or to impress sources or advertisers. The people of your community are citizens first. Don’t view them as customers who are defined by marketing demographics, attitudes or habits. Gary Dotson is senior editor at the Belleville News-Democrat, a paper with a decades-long record of in-depth reporting about economic, social and legal issues in southwest Illinois. He says the common theme behind many of the paper’s award-winning projects is simple but profound: Social justice. That means finding and telling stories about the disabled, the poor, the old, the neglected or forgotten – people who need help and aren’t getting it. Almost always, Dotson says, there’s an element of government not doing what it should. (You’ll read more about the News-Democrat in Chapter 12.)5 So don’t be afraid to challenge government or powerful institutions when they bear responsibility for problems. Boston Globe reporters and editors took on the Catholic Church in their 2003 PulitzerPrize-winning investigation of serial sexual abuse by priests, a story depicted in the Academy-Award-winning movie Spotlight.6 In his Pulitzer-winning series about West Virginia’s opioid epidemic, Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail pointed the finger at powerful – and wealthy – national drug wholesalers and distributors as major culprits in the state’s health crisis.7 The Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News teamed up for their 2019 exposé documenting hundreds of cases of sexual crimes and abuse committed in Southern Baptist churches by ministers, youth pastors, Sunday school teachers, deacons and volunteers. Many of the victims were adolescents who were molested, exposed to pornography and photographed nude; some children as young as 3 were raped inside pastors’ studies and Sunday school classrooms.8 Before he came to The Washington Post, Marty Baron was editor at The Boston Globe and supervised the paper’s investigation of the Catholic Church. He says news organizations have a responsibility to seek out and tell the stories of the “forgotten people of America . . . ordinary people who have suffered because of abuses of power.”9 He’s right. Don’t shirk your responsibility to speak for those who have little or no access to traditional forms of power and influence. It’s an important part of your job to talk to people whose lives are often ignored by the media, to tell their stories and to make sure their issues are brought to light.

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LOOKING FOR UNNOTICED AND ECCENTRIC STORIES As a journalist, you should strive to represent and reflect your community in all of its variety: Its different races and ethnicities, political viewpoints, faiths, ideologies, social and economic classes, sexual orientations and gender identifications. The idea is simple, but the execution is complex. Many news organizations don’t do a very good job of it, if they try at all. As a beginning journalist, you may find yourself too often relying on official sources and experts – higher-ups in government and politics, business and industry executives who have prestige and exercise influence in the community. They are important, of course, but they reflect only a slice of the citizenry. You miss opportunities to enrich your stories when you always talk to the same sources while neglecting citizens at the opposite end of the spectrum. Broaden your notion of where to look for stories. As discussed in Chapters 8 and 9, it’s easy to fall into the habit of going to the same places and talking to the same people. Don’t ignore the fascinating and important things that happen elsewhere. Visit neighborhoods and communities you’ve never seen before, especially those that are marginalized by society. If you only go to places that are warm, comfortable and welcoming, you’ll miss much of the vibrancy and grit of the real world. Above all, keep your focus on the “ordinary” people in your community as they go about their everyday lives. Their stories are important. During 40 years as a reporter at The New York Times, N.R. “Sonny” Kleinfield covered his share of breaking news stories, including murders, hurricanes and 9/11. But he considered himself foremost a feature writer who looked for “unnoticed and eccentric stories . . . about people who sit on the sidelines.” They weren’t famous or powerful. “They were anybody and everybody.” Among his subjects: •• A man who died alone in his apartment in early July 2015; his body was not discovered until more than a week later. There were no obvious answers as to who he was or what shape his life had taken. What worries weighed on him. Whom he loved and who loved him. Like most New Yorkers, he lived in the corners, under the pale light of obscurity.

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•• A retired health care executive diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, a common precursor to Alzheimer’s. The story focused on the period before her disease set in with full force. “‘It’s kind of a grace period,’ she said. ‘You’re waiting for something. Something you don’t want to come. It’s like a before-hell purgatory’.” •• A New York City firefighter, fresh out of the academy, waiting for his first fire, which to firefighters “is like a police officer’s first collar, a lawyer’s first jury trial, a fisherman’s first tuna. It becomes chiseled into your memory.” This firefighter had been waiting nearly 100 days for that experience. •• Residents of East Harlem, a place where people die of diabetes at a rate twice as high as in the city as a whole. There, the disease is an epidemic, touching nearly every life. “In East Harlem, in fact, it seems peculiar if you don’t have it.” Many of Kleinfield’s subjects were described as “ordinary people,” a term that he felt diminished them. To him, they were extraordinary. One young man had a disability that compelled him to scratch himself and damage his body. He’d been institutionalized, and wanted only to be independent and live in his own apartment. “Why do you want to write about me?” he asked Kleinfield. “I’m not important.” “I looked at him, a fidgety man aching for the primal freedom of a home, and told him, ‘I can’t imagine writing about anything more important’.”10

COMMIT TO COMPREHENSIVENESS The Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonprofit research organization affiliated with the Columbia University School of Journalism, was founded in 1997 to study and evaluate press performance, with a focus on journalistic responsibility. It’s now called the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project. In one of its early statements of purpose, the organization said this about journalism: [The] surest way for journalism to survive is by emphasizing what makes it unique – its basic purpose and core standards. Even in a new era, journalism has one responsibility other forms of communication and entertainment do not: to provide

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citizens with the information they need to navigate the society. That does not preclude being entertaining or profitable – or publishing something merely because it’s interesting. That does not mean that journalism should not abandon failed habits in the way we present news. But it does imply a commitment to comprehensiveness, to offering certain information about democratic institutions, and to ordering information in some relationship to its significance so that people can use it as a map to travel through the culture.11 Comprehensiveness means reporting on powerful and influential people and institutions. It also means reporting on the et ceteras, the people whose lives diverge from society’s norms. As Anne Hull would say, your job is to shine a light into the eyes of people who want to look away. Do it with the understanding that many in your audience may not want to be reminded of the problems on the fringes of society. Your mission may not make you wildly popular with some sectors of your audience, and you may also find yourself at odds with those who argue that there’s no business advantage to be gained from such reporting. But if you don’t do it, who will?

PAY ATTENTION TO THE ALARM BELLS What happens when news organizations ignore or are late in shining light on situations in which a little guy is on the receiving end of a bad deal? That’s what Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson believes happened in Flint, Michigan. As a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Jackson argued in a 2017 paper that the national media’s failure to respond in a timely and urgent manner to Flint’s water crisis increased the health risks for low-income and working-class residents in the city – and especially their children. Flint, once the home of the nation’s largest GM plant, went into economic decline when the automaker downsized in the 1980s. Its water crisis began in April 2014 when the state of Michigan switched the city’s public water supply from Lake Huron to the contaminated Flint River. The river water immediately ate into the pipes of Flint’s

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aging water system, releasing lead into the water. Residents quickly noticed problems with the smell, color and taste of their water and complained to local officials. The state claimed the water was safe, but the Flint Journal and television station WEYI interviewed residents who vehemently disagreed with that assessment. “I don’t know how it can be clean if it smells and tastes bad,” one man said. “It’s not proper for people to drink this, if I can smell it?” Local reporters continued to cover the story as citizens protested the nation’s highest home water bills and said the water smelled and changed colors daily. Meanwhile, the head of the city’s water operations described the water as “in great condition . . . clear and drinkable.” In October, the Flint Journal reported that GM had disconnected from the Flint water supply and tapped into another source from Lake Huron. The river water, GM said, was rusting and corroding metal in engine crankshafts. In a letter to the editor, one writer said, “Think it out folks. If it’s not good enough to wash off metal, exactly what is it doing to your bodies, your food, your clothes, your pipes?” Protests continued, but local news organizations were the only ones paying close attention. The first major coverage by outside media came when the Detroit Free Press attended a January 21, 2015, town hall meeting. A week later, hundreds of residents lined up in near-zero temperatures waiting for the distribution of 2,000 cases of bottled water donated by local businesses. People were desperate and angry. “This water is killing me,” one man shouted at Flint’s mayor at a public meeting. “While they are trying to figure this out, I am dying.” Police removed the man from the meeting after his outburst. The New York Times published its first story about the crisis on March 24, 2015. But the story didn’t mention the months of protests by citizens or the numerous giveaways of bottled water. The story began with a resident’s description of the water problems, but hers was the only example. And it didn’t tell its national readers that GM had switched its water source from the river. Over the next year, scientists confirmed that Flint’s water had dangerously high levels of lead. The state approved money to switch the city’s water supply back to Lake Huron. In January 2016 President Obama declared a state of emergency. The federal government sued the state. Residents sued the federal government. Several officials were charged with involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of 12 persons during the crisis.

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Jackson’s 55-page paper is a narrative of what happened – and what didn’t happen – in Flint. Local journalists reported on the marches, protests and anger of everyday citizens who were frightened that they and their kids were being poisoned. But the national media didn’t arrive on the scene until late, and even then the coverage was problematic: Citizens’ complaints were underplayed compared with the explanations given by officials; residents were portrayed as downtrodden and helpless despite months of protests and action; and media narratives of “heroes” excluded African-American activists in a city that was 57 percent black. Had the national media paid more attention earlier, many fewer children would have been poisoned, Jackson said, and he offered ideas about why it took so long for the crisis to become worthy of national attention. He cited a lack of diversity in the nation’s newsrooms; the national media’s history of paying little attention to environmental justice in poor communities or communities of color; and a tendency to act only after scientists and doctors confirm harm rather than in response to public protests. “When everyday citizens ring the alarm bell on issues” in their communities, Jackson said, “the national media must start from the assumption that locals know what they’re talking about.” Some in the national media acknowledged their failures. Margaret Sullivan, then the New York Times public editor, criticized the paper’s coverage. Had the paper done more “serious digging” earlier on, she wrote, “public officials might have been shamed into taking action long before they did.” The Washington Post’s Marty Baron said his paper should have done “more sooner, no question.” And CNN news anchor Jake Tapper ended an interview with Flint’s mayor by saying, “I’m sorry that it took us so long to get on this story.”12

CHANGE CAN BE SLOW Roanoke held hearings and conducted numerous studies after Madeline Tate died. A 1992 task force issued a report of more than 100 pages that said improving the education system was key to fighting poverty. It listed 170 proposals – many of them low cost – and called for a redirection of public and private spending to fight poverty. But poor people and their problems didn’t go away. In January 1996 – almost 11 years to the day after Tate’s death – Goldie Christine

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Duncan, a 46-year-old grandmother, and her four grandchildren, ages three to six, died on the second floor of their rental house in a fire that started on the first floor. Fire officials said Duncan tried to break through an upstairs window, but the window was covered with a thin wire mesh and she was unable to smash the glass. The house had no smoke detector, a violation of city code.13 An investigation by reporters Mary Bishop and Shannon Harrington found that Roanoke’s inner-city neighborhoods were still rotten, despite all the studies and recommendations over the previous decade. The paper ran a series over three weeks detailing, once again, the problems and suggesting solutions. The series showed that during the previous 30 years the city had looked into the problem of poor neighborhoods again and again – seven times, to be precise. The recommendations were always the same: Save and restore the old houses and the old neighborhoods or the whole city would suffer. Each time, the recommendations were ignored.14 The slow pace of change and improvement could have been cause for despair for citizens on the front line in the war on poverty. And it could discourage those who were reporting on the living conditions of the poor. Why weren’t people paying attention? You will learn that change doesn’t come as fast as you think it should. But don’t throw up your hands and walk away from important stories that need to be told and, often, retold. The Roanoke Times continued to report on the city’s poor and disadvantaged into the new century. Improvements – some marginal, some significant – were made in the lives of some of the city’s poor. But poverty wasn’t eliminated, in Roanoke or anywhere. Many poor people in this country still live at or over the edge. Don’t despair. Martin Luther King Jr. said the arc of the moral universe is long but tends toward justice.15 A similar faith keeps the best journalists plugging along, even when it seems only a few people are listening and paying attention. The disadvantaged still need to be heard. Journalists will always have a job to do telling their stories.

CONCLUSION In one of Roanoke’s old neighborhoods a stone marker reads: The city forgot her. Madeline A. Tate froze to death 1/21/85.16

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People like Madeline Tate live in the communities you cover. Few people know about the desperate lives they lead, the poverty they endure, or the difficult conditions that make up their daily existence. Telling their stories won’t be quick or easy, but it is something you must do, with compassion and understanding. It’s your job to force society to pay attention, before another wood stove goes out on a freezing night, before another home without smoke detectors burns to the ground. Bring those stories into the light.

 CHECKLIST •• Do a content analysis of your recent stories. Who were your sources? Who were the ordinary people you talked to? How much variety and diversity do you find in your work? •• Review the places you’ve visited in the past month. Where did you go? How many new places did you visit? Do you go to the same places for your stories? •• Make a list of new people to talk to and places to visit. Be deliberate and methodical. Create a plan to make new contacts on a regular basis. •• Use multimedia to help you see diversity. Multimedia and alternative story forms can heighten your awareness of the need for diverse sources in your stories. Photos, video and audio give you an opportunity to show a variety of faces and to hear a range of people speaking in their own voices. If all the faces and voices look and sound the same, you probably haven’t presented an accurate picture of your community. Words have power, but sound and pictures frequently have more.

 ASSIGNMENT David K. Shipler said reporters should spend time at food pantries, homeless shelters or similar agencies to find stories about people living on the edges of society and the issues that matter to them. When was the last time you visited one of these agencies and talked to the people they serve? Go to one and find a story – not about a social service program but about the problem the program is designed to address. Talk to the people who are affected and tell their stories.

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  OTHER RESOURCES Little people like Madeline Tate and Goldie Christine Duncan exist in every corner of the globe. That awareness led James Foley to one of the world’s most dangerous areas. A freelance journalist, he went to Libya in 2011 and was embedded with rebel fighters who opposed dictator Muammar Gaddafi. That April, Gaddafi loyalists killed a photojournalist and captured Foley and two other journalists. After 44 days, Foley and the others were released; he came back to the U.S., but he didn’t stay long. He returned to the Middle East to cover the Syrian civil war. In November 2012 he was abducted again, this time by Islamic State militia, who demanded ransom from his family. In August 2014, the Islamic State released a video of Foley kneeling in the desert, a masked terrorist beside him. The video then showed Foley’s body. He had been beheaded. Why did James Foley go back to the Middle East after being kidnapped the first time? A week before he returned, his parish priest had dinner with Foley and his family, and he asked Foley that very question. “His response, and I’ll never forget it, was, ‘Father, I need to go back because the world needs to know the plight of people who are being walked on like grass underfoot’.” You can learn more about James Foley at: www.franciscanmedia. org/james-foley-journalist-man-of-faith, and: https://vimeo.com/290571022, and: https://unesco.exposure.co/his-name-was-james-foley.

NOTES 1 Interview with Douglas Pardue, March 24, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. His story, “Madeline Adams Tate: Now She is Just a Number,” ran January 26, 1985, in The Roanoke Times. “Forgotten Houses, Forgotten People,” Pardue’s three-part investigative series, ran in May 1985. The series won a 1986 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award citation. 2 Smith, interview with Studs Terkel and Alex Kotlowitz, PBS NewsHour, August 3, 2005. 3 David K. Shipler, “Monkey See, Monkey Do: If Pols Ignore Poverty, the Press Does, Too,” Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2005. 4 Anne Hull, 2008 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Convocation, Colby College, Waterville, Maine, September 28, 2008. 5 Interview with Gary Dotson, July 13, 2018. 6 The Globe’s prize-winning entry can be read at: www.pulitzer.org/winners/ boston-globe-1.

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7 Eric Eyre’s series can be found at www.pulitzer.org/winners/eric-eyre. 8 www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/Southern-Baptistsexual-abuse-spreads-as-leaders-13588038.php?utm_source=news letter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam& stream=top. 9 Julie Waldow, “Washington Post’s Marty Baron: People Have Taken the Press for Granted,” CNNBusiness, June 29, 2018. 10 N.R. Kleinfeld, “Chronicling the Unnoticed,” The New York Times, May 27, 2018. A collection of his favorite stories can be found at www.nytimes. com/interactive/2015/10/17/nyregion/new-york-city-stories.html. 11 www.journalism.org. 12 Derrick Z. Jackson, Environmental Justice? Unjust Coverage of the Flint Water Crisis, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, July 2017. 13 Diane Struzzi, “Fire Inquiry Not Finished,” The Roanoke Times, February 4, 1996. 14 Interview with Mary Bishop, August 31, 2008, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. “The Invisible Inner City,” a series by Bishop and Shannon Harrington that explored poverty in Roanoke, ran June 1–21, 1997. 15 The phrase was not original with King. He paraphrased part of an 1853 sermon by abolitionist minister Theodore Parker. See Michael Denzel Smith, “The Truth About ‘The Arc of The Moral Universe,’” The Huffington Post, January 18, 2018. 16 Leslie Taylor, “Going to Extremes to Help Homeless,” The Roanoke Times, January 28, 1996.

12 Be a Watchdog The 14-year-old girl rode her bike to an area outside Baldwin, a small town in southwest Illinois. There, she said, five men took her to a duck blind where two of them sexually assaulted her while the others looked on. She didn’t identify the men at first, but she later named two suspects. Police questioned her in front of neighbors outside the hospital where she was taken for treatment. The girl’s grandparents, who were her legal guardians, later said the duck blind was never processed for evidence. Police said the girl’s story was inconsistent. Her classmates called her a whore and said she made the story up. Her mother told police the girl was a habitual liar. That was in August 2009. In early 2010, the girl’s grandmother called the Belleville News-Democrat to see if someone could find out why no one had been charged. Reporters George Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer decided to take a look. So began an investigation into how police and prosecutors in Illinois handled rape and sexual abuse cases. It wasn’t easy. The reporters wanted to know how many crimes were committed and where, who was charged, and how the cases were resolved. No master repository of those records existed, so Pawlaczyk and Hundsdorfer piled up more than 3,500 miles driving to courthouses in 32 counties to get the information. They encountered recalcitrant court clerks, sealed files and redacted police reports as well as inconsistencies in how authorities in different jurisdictions classified misdemeanor and felony abuse cases. One clerk refused to turn over police files because she said the smell of

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a redacting pen made her sick and, besides, she didn’t have time to help the reporters. Nevertheless, Pawlaczyk and Hundsdorfer obtained more than 15,000 pages of court records. They used the Illinois Freedom of Information Act to get more than 1,000 police reports. They also found women who were willing to talk on the record about what happened to them. “Most of these women, when we asked them if we could use their name, they were pretty unfailing in saying, ‘Yes, use my name. Take my picture’,” Hundsdorfer said in a video account of how she and Pawlaczyk did their reporting. “They wanted somebody to hear their story. It was important to them. They were very courageous telling very private details to a story to a stranger again, and trusting us with their story, again.” One woman opened a cardboard box where she kept photos showing injuries she had sustained during a 2006 sexual assault and the police reports of the rape investigation. She also had a copy of the court order dismissing the rape charges; instead, the suspect pleaded guilty to domestic battery and spent two years in prison. Another woman, who was paralyzed from the waist down and used a wheelchair, was burned, punched and raped outside a bar in 2007. The man was indicted for 13 felonies, including criminal sexual assault of a handicapped person. Two years later, a dozen charges were dropped because a courthouse elevator broke down and the woman could not get to a second-floor courtroom to testify. A mistrial was declared, and the man later received probation on one felony battery count. Pawlaczyk and Hundsdorfer interviewed a man who had been accused of rape four times and charged twice. Two eighth-graders told police the man got them drunk and raped them. The man said he was a victim of scorned women who were trying to get even. He was convicted of felony aggravated battery and misdemeanor domestic battery. Neither is classified as a sex crime. In the case of the girl who said she’d been raped in the duck blind, the reporters obtained a medical report of her hospital examination that, based on physical evidence, concluded the girl had been sexually assaulted. Police had never seen the report until Pawlaczyk gave them a copy nine months later. The News-Democrat told those stories and others in “Violation of Trust,” a 2015 multimedia series. Focusing on 2005–2013, the investigation showed:

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•• Of more than 6,700 felony sex crimes reported to police in the region, 70 percent never made it to a courtroom. •• The overall chance that a felony sex crime suspect would go to prison was just 10 percent. Conviction rates for suspects who were prosecuted ranged from 55 to 85 percent. •• Some cities with large police departments and the most investigators had the highest number of felony sex crimes reported but some of the lowest prosecution rates. Until the News-Democrat’s investigation, the public had no way of knowing how few reported sex crimes ended up in court because no state or federal agencies – not even the FBI – compiled such data.1 The series won two national journalism awards. It also got the attention of state government, leading Illinois’s attorney general to form a task force to overhaul the investigation and prosecution of sex crimes statewide.

A lot of your work may be about serious subjects, but some will be light, perhaps even fluff. There’s nothing wrong with that, just as long as you don’t lose sight of your most important mission. At the core, your primary duty as a journalist is to serve as a watchdog, looking out for the interests of the public you serve. Many people assume that these responsibilities fall only on veteran investigative reporters and editors, but all journalists should see themselves in this light, regardless of their beats or assignments. If you take that mission to heart, you’ll find nothing more satisfying or important than serving as a watchdog. Good journalists hold society and its institutions accountable at all levels and give citizens the information they need to make sound decisions in their public and private lives. As watchdogs, journalists look hard at government, education, businesses and utilities, nonprofits, the justice system, the health care industry and religious institutions. At their best they also aggressively report on the news industry and their own organizations. They uncover things that someone is trying to hide, and they sort truth from lies, clarify distortions, dispel rumors and expose corruption and unfair and unjust practices. They reveal dishonesty, incompetence and injustice. They ask questions about systems, programs and political, social and economic agendas, pointing out flaws that allow abuses to occur. They look for solutions when possible. They hold public and private

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powerbrokers accountable, and – as discussed in Chapter 11 – they listen to and give voice to people who have little or no influence. Pulitzer Prize winner Maurice Possley said the best watchdog journalism sheds light on things that otherwise would not be seen. It shows people the great difference between how things are supposed to work and what is really happening.2 Watchdog reporting can take many forms. It can expose governmental actions at the highest, most secretive levels. That’s what the Guardian U.S. did in 2013 with its influential – and controversial – stories about domestic and international surveillance programs, using classified documents leaked by a former U.S. intelligence analyst.3 KXAS-TV in Dallas-Fort Worth focused on local governmental corruption in 2017 when it uncovered bribes, kickbacks and conflicts of interests in how contracts were handled for security cameras installed on public school buses.4 Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail spent three years looking into how hundreds of millions of opioid pills were shipped into depressed West Virginia counties with some of the country’s highest overdose death rates. Marie Wilson and Jessica Cilella of the Daily Herald in Arlington Heights, Illinois, explored the heroin crisis in Chicago’s suburbs in a yearlong series, calling attention to a major health problem that many citizens preferred to ignore or wish away.5 The Tampa Bay Times and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune collaborated on a Pulitzer-Prize-winning series that uncovered neglect and abuse in Florida’s six primary mental health hospitals.6 Reporters at the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram interviewed more than 200 people for a 2018 report documenting hundreds of sexual abuse and misconduct allegations at independent fundamentalist Baptist churches in Texas and across the country.7 Large newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post are known for investigative reporting and their watchdog attitude. That same mindset is found in smaller dailies in Belleville, Sarasota and Charleston, South Carolina, and Charleston, West Virginia. The Malheur Enterprise in Oregon and the Storm Lake Times in Iowa are non-dailies that have been recognized for their watchdog reporting. Local television stations have increased their investigative efforts in recent years. KARE in Minneapolis won Investigative Reporters and Editors’ top broadcast award in 2016 for reporting that veterans with traumatic brain injuries were often treated by unqualified doctors and were sometimes denied appropriate treatment and benefits. The report prompted a nationwide review by the Veterans Administration. An investigation by Fox 8 WVUE-TV in New Orleans disclosed that some health insurance plans resulted in prescriptions that cost more

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than they would with no insurance at all. KUSA-TV in Denver has done dozens of stories investigating suspiciously high medical bills sent to patients, often helping people erase overcharges and billing errors. An investigation by WFAA in Dallas found that pigs were treated better than inmates in the Texas prison system, where inmates died of preventable causes, and that the stifling heat in buildings without air-conditioning sickened guards.8 Non-traditional news organizations have assumed watchdog responsibilities as well. ProPublica is committed to investigative journalism on a national scale, winning four Pulitzer Prizes and scores of other awards since its launch in 2007. It shared the 2017 Pulitzer for Public Service with the New York Daily News for stories about how New York City Police abused eviction rules to oust hundreds of people – mostly poor minorities – from their living quarters. The nonprofit Center for Public Integrity won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting in 2014 for stories about how lawyers and doctors rigged the system to deny benefits to coal miners stricken with black lung disease.9 Student journalists also practice watchdog journalism. Sammy Sussman, a sophomore at the University of Michigan writing for The Michigan Daily, uncovered four decades of sexual misconduct allegations against a professor in the university’s music school.10 Ramiro Ferrando, a University of Illinois journalism graduate student writing for CU-CitizenAccess.org, analyzed data nationwide to produce a report that showed in words and visuals how abortion access in the U.S. has become more and more limited because of a sharp increase in restrictive laws in many states.11 Good watchdog journalism is not easy: It can take months to produce – often by journalists who have other assignments as well. And the necessary time and resources – not to mention commitment from corporate owners – are often in short supply at many news organizations today. What watchdog reporting needs most to survive, though, are journalists who are dedicated to producing stories that tell the public what is really going on and that give people information they need to change systems, institutions, policies and, when necessary, leaders. It needs someone like you.

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, AND THE RESPONSIBILITY THAT COMES WITH IT A watchdog mindset is a key component of your civic obligation as a journalist. The First Amendment allows you to go about your work

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without government interference or restraint. But a responsibility accompanies this privilege. Don’t lose sight of how freedom of the press is tied to the other freedoms enumerated in the First Amendment. Americans have the freedom to speak and the right to meet peaceably and to petition government when they think change is warranted or something needs to be fixed. For the people to exercise those freedoms wisely – as founding father James Madison observed, time and again – they must be fully informed about what government and other institutions are doing. Journalists must monitor those centers of power and tell the people what’s going on so they can make informed decisions and take action. Scott Lewis, editor-in-chief of VoiceofSanDiego.org, which was the country’s first digital nonprofit news organization serving a local community, described this kind of information as a “public service,” one of the things needed “to operate a civil society, and the market isn’t doing it very well.”12 Lewis’s observation – in 2008 – applies even more today with the proliferation of numerous “news” sources that may – or may not – be committed to scratching beneath the surface to make sure that the facts are correct and presented with context. That’s where watchdog journalism comes in. At its best, former New York Times editor Bill Kovach said, watchdog journalism goes beyond a “simple journalism of witness” and alerts citizens to the changing circumstances affecting their lives. Kovach urged journalists to probe beneath the surface of events, challenging assumptions and assertions and producing stories that invite “a civic judgment.”13 By helping citizens make knowledgeable decisions, watchdog journalism is “a critical part of creating an informed and democratic society,” says Brant Houston, the Knight Chair of Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois. Equally important, Houston says, it reins in the excesses of the powerful and holds government and other institutions accountable for their actions.14 Media scholar James Carey put it more bluntly. The role of the press is simply to make sure in the long run that we don’t get screwed, and it does this best by treating us not as consumers of news, but by encouraging the conditions of public discourse and life.15 Watchdog journalists understand that their stories will make some people uncomfortable and angry, particularly those in power. That’s all right. An old definition of journalism says it should comfort the

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afflicted and afflict the comfortable. That’s still a useful rule of thumb for the craft. Don’t be afraid to shake things up.

ADOPTING AN ATTITUDE OF WATCHDOG JOURNALISM The Belleville News-Democrat is headquartered in St. Clair County, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. The paper was founded in 1858 and has published continuously since then. In recent years it has encountered problems similar to ones that have plagued other newspapers, large and small, around the country. Its circulation, nearly 90,000 in the early 1990s, dropped to under 21,000 daily and 53,000 on Sundays in 2017. (Average monthly page views in 2017, however, were 7.8 million.)16 In 2014 it had 11 full-time news reporters, about half what it had 15 years before, and a total newsroom staff of 37, down from 58. The numbers belie the paper’s commitment and impact. It’s long been recognized as one of the country’s best small papers for investigative reporting and watchdog journalism. In the 1990s it broke stories about sexual misconduct by local Roman Catholic priests years before such abuse became a national scandal. In 1992 the paper revealed that Belleville police racially profiled black motorists to keep African-Americans out of the city. The city entered into a consent decree to stop the profiling after the U.S. Justice Department looked into the matter. In 2002 the paper revealed how housing inspectors and armed police officers illegally entered homes to check for occupancy violations. In “Lethal Lapses,” a 2006 series, George Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer reported that 53 children died over seven years while in state care. They found that state workers made serious errors, had major lapses in judgment, and failed to follow agency guidelines. Children died after being beaten, burned, smothered and starved, even though the state knew they were at risk, yet failed to remove them from their homes. The series won major awards, including a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for outstanding reporting on social justice issues. In 2009 Pawlaczyk and Hundsdorfer investigated harsh conditions at a supermax prison that housed Illinois’s most violent inmates. They discovered that one-fifth of the prison’s inmates – many suffering from mental illness – had been held in solitary confinement for

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23 hours a day, some for ten years or longer. Human rights groups pressed for reforms. The series won a prestigious George Polk Award. Among the newspaper’s other watchdog stories: •• A 2010 report that a local treasurer had rigged his county’s delinquent tax rate to benefit himself and others at the expense of residents who were on the verge of losing their homes. •• A series about fraudulent workers’ compensation claims by state employees that cost taxpayers more than $10 million. The stories spurred five separate investigations, including two criminal probes. •• A 2011 series into the rise of drug overdose deaths in St. Clair County. •• A 2012 investigation into the deaths of severely disabled adults in their own homes showed that the state agency charged with protecting them failed to investigate the deaths for possible abuse or neglect by family members or caretakers. Instead, the agency closed its files on the cases because the dead were ruled “ineligible for services.” Senior Editor Gary Dotson has overseen most of the paper’s investigative projects. He says the News-Democrat’s track record of watchdog journalism is a result of a philosophy that sets it apart from many other newspapers, particularly at a time when reporting staffs and resources have been cut industry-wide. “You have to be committed to it, whatever your newsroom size is,” he said. “You’ve got to devote a certain percentage to doing high-impact journalism and not high-tail and run the first time there’s a breaking story or three people leave. You’ve got to keep at it.” Pawlaczyk and Hundsdorfer worked as a team for more than a dozen years, but Dotson says the newsroom’s culture is one in which the DNA of watchdog reporting is ingrained in every beat reporter. The result, he says, is that watchdog journalism at the paper is an “attitude rather than a project.” The stories can come from anywhere – tips, hunches, but rarely from an editor’s idea. A good watchdog reporter keeps an ear to the ground, questions things that don’t seem right, and then checks them out. News-Democrat reporters approach small stories as well as large ones with a watchdog mindset. When a new fire chief is hired, the beat reporter is expected to check his background, to find out where he worked before, what he did, what he failed to do. Reporters routinely file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for payroll

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and travel records and check to see whether elected and appointed public officials have criminal records. Dotson has a journalism degree from the University of Missouri and in 2014 earned an M.S. in Mass Communications from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. For his Master’s thesis, he analyzed how his paper and the Sarasota News-Herald achieved success in investigative reporting despite being smaller-circulation papers in major metro markets. Among his conclusions: •• A watchdog attitude and a commitment to investigative stories must be priorities. Even when resources are scarce, watchdog reporting serves readers better than covering routine stories or events. It makes little sense to send a reporter to a sewer committee meeting for a story that only 30 people will read. •• Public records are crucial to watchdog reporting. Court files, official budgets and audits, police reports, property records – all add to a story’s authority. You need to know your state’s FOIA and use it to get public records. And you must apply the same standards of verification to documents and records as you do to human sources. •• Staying focused is important. Don’t let breaking news or staff changes put a stop to your watchdog mission. (Appropriate advice in particular for the News-Democrat. Beth Hundsdorfer left the paper for St. Louis Public Radio at the end of 2018, and George Pawlaczyk retired in March 2019. Their final project was about nearby East St. Louis, Illinois, which has the nation’s highest murder rate. You can read it at www.bnd.com/news/local/crime/article229183394.html.) •• Reporters must learn how to find, analyze and use data. Ask for help when you need it. •• Editors should stress investigative work throughout the newsroom, and team beginning reporters with more experienced ones. Dotson emphasizes that it’s important for reporters and editors to be committed to “fighting injustice, righting wrongs and holding others accountable.” In many cases, a “sense of outrage” is entirely appropriate. “It does become personal,” he said. “You become driven by wanting to expose that injustice or right that wrong for the victims. Many times the victims are dead. You still want justice for them.”17 “They were victims and nothing happened,” Hundsdorfer said in explaining the reporting that went into the “Violation of Trust” series. “Just to give them a chance to have a voice and see anything happen, that’s probably the biggest benefit of what we did.”18

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MANAGING YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES The three New York Times reporters looking into Donald Trump’s financial history spent 18 months poring over 100,000 pages of documents, then knocking on doors and conducting scores of interviews to put together a 14,000-word story that ran over eight full pages in the paper in October 2018. Backstopping the reporters was a team of five editors and more than 20 photographers, designers, researchers, animators and news staffers.19 You probably won’t ever experience anything quite like that. Pawlaczyk and Hundsdorfer pulled weekend shifts and did daily stories for the three years they worked on the “Violation of Trust” series. During the three years that Eric Eyre worked on his investigation into West Virginia’s opioid crisis, he also covered the state legislative session and worked a monthly night shift. Daniel Gilbert won the 2010 Pulitzer for Public Service for his series in the Bristol, Virginia, Herald-Courier about the mismanagement of natural-gas royalties owed to Southwest Virginia landowners. Nine days before the prize was announced, Gilbert covered an Easter egg hunt and interviewed people dressed as Easter bunnies.20 Watchdog journalism requires a disciplined approach to the work. It’s not always exciting or glamorous, especially if you’re trying to juggle a beat or daily reporting assignments. Laura Frank was an investigative reporter at the Nashville Tennessean and later the Rocky Mountain News. When the Rocky closed in 2009, she founded a nonprofit investigative news service serving the greater Denver area, and she’s now vice president of journalism for Rocky Mountain PBS. In an Investigative Reporters and Editors watchdog workshop at the University of Illinois, she offered tips for how reporters can manage their watchdog responsibilities while working daily beats. Among them: •• Keep a list of ideas gleaned from your daily reporting. Frank cited a technique called the two-notebook theory. Keep one notebook for daily work and a second for enterprise stories, which aren’t tied to events or assignments but grow out of tips and information from other sources. Examine the seriousness of the idea, look for an “outrage factor,” and see if the story has been told before. •• Sell a prospective story to editors by giving them a minimum and a maximum plan. Outline what you think you can produce at the very least and at the most. Even at the least, you’ll have a story you might not have found otherwise.

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•• Be organized in your reporting. Figure out who the best sources are. Start on the periphery with general sources and work to the center as you build up your knowledge. Be sure to talk with sources who disagree with your premise for the story. Always look for documents, records and data that can substantiate your story. •• Be organized in your interviewing. Keep detailed notes and files for different topics. (Also follow interviewing tips suggested in Chapter 5.) •• Make to-do lists each day of what you’ve done and what you need to do next. •• Write as you report. Frank believes this will help you see the holes in your story and alert you to the need to change directions. Don’t freak out if you do have to shift focus; that’s why you do the reporting. •• Fact check. Get it right. See Chapter 3. •• Get feedback from your sources. They may give you follow-up ideas.21

CONCLUSION Legendary muckraker I.F. Stone was once introduced at a student journalism conference as an investigative reporter. Stone dismissed the term, saying it was redundant. All reporters should be investigative, he said.22 That’s been the approach at the Belleville News-Democrat; it should be your attitude as well. Approach each day with a watchdog mindset and look for the untold story or the one that someone in power is trying to hide. Not all of them will become watchdog stories, but some will. Be curious and skeptical and always ask questions. Remember, your job is to tell people what’s really going on and why, to get to the bottom of the story, to discover information of public importance that someone wants to keep secret. The force driving many of Belleville’s stories was a “sense of outrage” to right wrongs. A former publisher set a tone in Charleston, West Virginia, with a call for “sustained outrage,” a hammering away at injustices until they’re righted. New York Times reporter David Barstow, the winner of four Pulitzers, says the journalistic obligation to hold power accountable is what makes him go to work every day – even though, in the case of the Times’s investigation of Donald Trump’s finances, the work infuriated the most powerful person in the world.23 You may wonder if you’ll even be capable of doing this kind of work. When you start your professional career you’ll have lots of

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responsibilities, and your editors will be on top of you for stories they need for the next news cycle. Deadlines will be tight. You may worry that your newsroom is small and doesn’t have what it needs to pursue good watchdog journalism. Get over it. Even in good economic times, reporters and editors complained that they needed more time, staff and financial support. Small new organizations have always been faced with limited resources. Yet the best journalists somehow still find ways to do the important work, on stories big and small. Size doesn’t matter. Good watchdog reporting starts with journalists filled with a passion to tell people what’s really going on. Big organizations might have more reporters on staff, but they don’t have exclusive rights to watchdog journalism. You don’t have to be a big dog to be a watchdog. It’s hard work, but it’s also fun – and satisfying. Watchdog journalists realize this kind of reporting feeds their souls and makes a difference in the lives of people around them. They also understand that if they don’t do it, there’s a good chance no one else will, either. The late William C. Gaines, a three-time Pulitzer winner at the Chicago Tribune and the first Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois, said watchdog journalists believe in the importance of being on the side of truth and fairness. Plus, Gaines said, watchdog reporting is often “the last hope of those who want to correct a wrong.”24

 CHECKLIST •• Always ask how and why. And don’t simply concentrate on wrongdoers. Look for the flaws in systems that allow injustices to occur. Look for ways things can be improved. •• Make it worthwhile. Don’t go after something that isn’t important. Your readers, viewers and listeners expect you to keep things in perspective, not to focus on the trivial or the merely sensational. •• Don’t forget people. Real people should be at the heart of every story. Show how people are affected by the problems or issues you’re reporting on. •• Be fair and get it right. Zeal is important, but it can get you into trouble. Follow the facts. Be curious and remain skeptical. Verify everything. And don’t be afraid to change your mind. “If you are really doing your job as an observer,” I.F. Stone said,

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it’s more important to say what you see than to worry about inconsistency. If you are worried about that, then you stop looking. And if you stop looking, you’re not a real reporter anymore. I have no inhibitions about changing my mind.25 •• Be comfortable with gray. Sometimes you’ll uncover villains and scoundrels, but sometimes you’ll just find shades of gray. Accept the gray and resist painting people and organizations in strictly black or white terms. •• Be transparent. Explain how you did your work. Avoid anonymous sources as much as possible. David Barstow said a goal of the New York Times team investigating Donald Trump’s finances was to make everything in their story – the math, the sources, the things they didn’t know for sure – as clear as possible in order to give readers every reason to believe that “what they were reading was not fake.”26 •• Don’t preach or be a scold. Make your story as strong as it can be with facts and details, but let your readers and viewers decide for themselves what you’ve proved. Don’t tell them what to think. •• Join Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE). You’ll get ideas, advice and tips as well as access to thousands of stories in IRE’s archives, along with a network of working journalists who can give you suggestions. The IRE Journal includes accounts of how reporters at small and large organizations do their work. A student membership costs $25. •• Remember that change can be slow. Many of the Belleville NewsDemocrat’s investigative projects resulted in immediate public responses. That doesn’t always happen. Be patient. Watchdog journalism is important. Keep plugging away.

 ASSIGNMENTS 1. Read Eric Eyre’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning stories about West Virginia’s opioid crisis at www.pulitzer.org/winners/eric-eyre. Then read these interviews with Eyre about his series and how he reported it while juggling daily responsibilities: www.npr. org/2017/04/15/524076490/a-pulitzer-winning-journalists-adviceand-why-he-does-a-monthly-night-shift; and www.poynter.org/ reporting-editing/2017/the-journalist-who-won-the-charlestongazette-mails-first-pulitzer-still-does-a-monthly-night-cops-shift.

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Then answer the following questions: a. What lessons can you take away from his experience balancing daily and in-depth reporting responsibilities? b. How would you put his example into practice in your own work? 2. Laura Frank advocated keeping two notebooks, one for everyday reporting and one for investigative and enterprise work. Start your second notebook; take note of the things that raise questions about how systems work and how they don’t work.

  OTHER RESOURCES I.F. Stone’s reporting career was well before your time, so you may not be familiar with him or the stories he produced from 1953 to 1971 for his newsletter, the politically progressive I.F. Stone’s Weekly. Watch this interview with Stone from the 1970s to get an idea of what he stood for and how he went about his work: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g. Many news organizations have reduced or eliminated their watchdog responsibilities because it is expensive and can take a lot of time. And newspapers in many smaller communities have closed because of financial problems. What are some of the consequences to civic life when the watchdogs disappear? Listen to this episode of NPR’s “Hidden Brain” for some answers: www. npr.org/2018/12/09/675092808/starving-the-watchdog-who-footsthe-bill-when-newspapers-disappear. Why does watchdog journalism matter? Watch the video about ProPublica and NPR and their series, “Lost Mothers,” which won the 2018 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Policy: https://shorensteincenter.org/goldsmith-awards/investigative-reporting-prize.

NOTES 1 George Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer, “Violation of Trust,” Belleville News-Democrat, February 2015; Jackie Spinner, “Meet the Reporting Duo Helping a Mid-Size Illinois Paper Punch Above its Weight,” cjr.org, February 3, 2016. The series, along with a video and radio interview about how Pawlaczyk and Hundsdorfer reported the

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series, can be found at http://media.bnd.com/static/media/VOT/indexhow.html. 2 Maurice Possley interview, January 24, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. 3 The Guardian’s stories are at www.pulitzer.org/winners/guardian-us. 4 The KXAS series is at www.nbcdfw.com/investigations/Big-Buses_PeabodyWinner_Dallas-Fort-Worth-480752001.html. 5 “Daily Herald Wins 12 Associated Press Awards, Including Public Service,” Daily Herald, June 12, 2015; Marie Wilson, “Despite Progress, Heroin Fight in Suburbs Far From Over,” “What’s Next in Suburbs Fight Against Heroin?” Daily Herald, July 21, 2015. 6 The Tampa Bay/Sarasota series is at www.pulitzer.org/winners/leonoralapeter-anton-and-anthony-cormier-tampa-bay-times-and-michaelbraga-sarasota-herald. 7 Neil Nakahodo, Shelly Yang, Sarah Smith, “Hundreds of Sex Abuse Allegations Found in Fundamental Baptist Churches Across U.S.,” Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, December 9, 2018. 8 KARE’s series can be found at: www.kare11.com/article/news/investigations/invisible-wounds-treatment-and-reform/89-365034455; Stories in WVUE’s “Cracking the Code” can be found at: www.fox8live.com/news/ investigate/cracking-the-code; KUSA-TV’s stories can be found at www. showusyourbills.com; WFAA’s report can be found at: https://vimeo.com/ wfaa/review/151846234/686ead36ea. 9 The ProPublica and the Daily News stories can be found at: www.pulitzer.org/winners/new-york-daily-news-and-propublica. The Center for Public Integrity’s entry can be found at www.pulitzer.org/winners/chrishamby. 10 Sammy Sussman, “Former Students Bring 40 Years of Misconduct Allegations by SMTD Professor,” The Michigan Daily, December 10, 2018. 11 Ramiro Farrando, “Data Shows Wide Variations in Access to Abortion Clinics Nationwide,” cu-citizenaccess.org, February 8, 2019. 12 Richard Perez-Pena, “Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Community Watchdogs,” The New York Times, November 18, 2008. 13 Bill Kovach, “The Daily Work of the Media,” Nieman Reports, summer 1998. 14 Houston, The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook, p. 3. 15 James W. Carey, “A Plea for the University Tradition,” Journalism Quarterly, 1978, p. 855. 16 www.mcclatchy.com/our-impact/markets/belleville-news-democrat. 17 Interviews with Gary Dotson, February 12, 2009, and November 9, 2010, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition; and July 13, 2018. Gary Dotson, Watchdogs Still Watching: An Analysis of Investigative Reporting at the Belleville News-Democrat and Sarasota Herald-Tribune, thesis submitted to the Graduate School, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, May 2014. 18 Spinner, “Meet the Reporting Duo Helping a Mid-Size Illinois Paper Punch Above its Weight,” cjr.org, February 3, 2016. 19 David Barstow, Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father,” The New York Times, October 2, 2018.

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20 Linda Wertheimer, “A Pulitzer-Winning Journalist’s Advice and Why He Does a Monthly Night Shift,” NPR Morning Edition, April 15, 2017; Kristen Hare, “Journalist Who Won the Charleston Gazette-Mail’s First Pulitzer Still Does a Monthly Night Cops Shift,” poynter.org, April 10, 2017; “Uncommon Interview: Daniel Gilbert,” The Chicago Maroon, May 18, 2010. 21 Interview with Laura Frank, January 12, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition; “The Watchdog and the Watch: Managing Your Time to do Both Investigative Work and Beat Reporting,” presentation at IRE workshop at the University of Illinois, April 2008. 22 Ralph Nader, “Ode to an Inspiring Journalist,” ralphnader.org, June 20, 1989. 23 “A Conversation with David Barstow of the New York Times,” Washington and Lee University, October 31, 2018, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5IeGdrkk2EI. 24 William C. Gaines, Investigative Journalism: Proven Strategies for Reporting the Story, CQ Press, 2008, pp. 2–3. 25 D.D. Guttenplan, “The Secret History of Izzy,” The Nation, June 1, 2009. 26 “A Conversation with David Barstow of the New York Times,” Washington and Lee University, October 31, 2018, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5IeGdrkk2EI.

13 Do the Right Thing The 1A lead story in the February 9, 2006, Daily Illini (DI), the independent student newspaper at the University of Illinois, was about a debate in the state legislature over rising textbook prices. Another story dealt with new tests to detect bird flu and quoted a professor at the university’s veterinary school. An Associated Press story reported that then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich was leading in polls for an upcoming Illinois Democratic primary. At the bottom of the page, another AP story described riots across the Muslim world protesting editorial cartoons that satirized the prophet Muhammad. But people weren’t talking about the front page as the day went on. Instead, attention was focused on the six cartoons depicting Muhammad on the DI’s opinions page. In one, the prophet’s turban was a lighted bomb. In another, the prophet clutched a knife, and in another devil’s horns protruded from his turban. The cartoons were first published in Denmark and triggered protests from Muslims who believed the images were blasphemous. Their publication sparked deadly riots in Nigeria, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Lebanon. Newspaper editors around the world debated whether to reprint the cartoons. Many European papers did, but most U.S. newspapers chose not to. In a column that ran beside the cartoons, DI editor-in-chief Acton Gorton described them as “bigoted and insensitive,” but he criticized the American press for not publishing them. “As a journalist, this flies in the face of everything I hold dear. By refusing to print these editorial cartoons, we are preventing an important issue from being debated by the public.” He said he hoped publishing them would create a “dialogue on the campus and in the community.”

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“Exercise your First Amendment right and don’t be afraid to say something unpopular,” he concluded. “As citizens we have a right to use that freedom.” Angry readers called the DI to complain. Muslim students and others protested on the main campus quadrangle. The university’s chancellor wrote that the paper could have engaged readers in “legitimate debate” without publishing the cartoons. Another letter writer accused Gorton of “journalistic arson . . . Just because Mr. Gorton has the right to reprint the cartoons doesn’t mean he should reprint the cartoons. The profession of journalism carries a great responsibility. I feel Mr. Gorton has betrayed that responsibility.” Other readers supported Gorton. One said he showed “tremendous courage to defend freedom of the press in the face of possible destruction by Islamic religious fanatic terrorists.” Another commended the paper for “its courageous stand in defense of freedom of speech.” Some DI editors, though, criticized how the decision to publish was made. In a column the next day, they said Gorton and opinions page editor Chuck Prochaska ran the cartoons without consulting the student editorial board, the publisher or the paid editorial adviser. The dissenting editors said they did not necessarily disagree with the decision to publish, but they objected to how the decision was reached and how the cartoons were displayed. Readers, they said, were talking about whether the DI was right or wrong to publish the cartoons instead of what they represented to Muslims and non-Muslims. In response, Gorton and Prochaska accused the other editors of lacking courage and commitment to a free press and the First Amendment. They said everyone in the newsroom the night before publication knew the cartoons were running. No one objected until the backlash started. And they insisted that Gorton, as editor-in-chief, had final authority over the paper’s content. “Free speech is all about more speech,” Gorton and Prochaska wrote. “We will not resign. We will not issue an apology.”1

As a young journalist you are learning how to gather and put information together in a story, accurately and fairly. You’re also learning how to ask good questions and to listen carefully to the answers you’re given, and then to verify what you’ve been told. You’re beginning to understand the importance of seeing and hearing things with your own eyes and ears, and how critical it is that you understand the people and the places you write about. Yet, being a good journalist is more than gathering, writing and presenting the news. You must also learn how to make sound decisions

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about what you choose to report as well as what you do not report. That process isn’t simple. As you go about your daily work, you will be routinely challenged by stories and situations that will require you to make ethical choices. And there are no Ten Commandments or Hippocratic oaths for journalists that you can memorize and consult for every circumstance you face. Unfortunately, many citizens think that journalism ethics is an oxymoron. They’ve read or heard about situations where journalists acted unethically or improperly. Some cases of plagiarism and outright fabrication have become legendary: Stephen Glass invented quotes, sources and events for stories in The New Republic; Jayson Blair plagiarized and fabricated material in dozens of stories for The New York Times; Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize for a Washington Post story about an eight-year-old heroin-addict that turned out to be a lie. More recently, Claas Relotius, a reporter for the German magazine Der Spiegel who was named 2014 CNN Journalist of the Year for his investigative reporting, was fired in 2018 after it was revealed he invented characters and made up stories. He was even accused of embezzling donations from readers that were intended for Syrian street children.2 Journalism gets a black eye as well from practitioners who have had inappropriate relationships with sources and from others who have misrepresented themselves – or even lied – to get information or pictures for their stories. And instances where reporters and photographers have been insensitive, rude or abusive to victims or survivors of crime or natural disasters only reinforce the public’s notion that journalists have little or no sense of compassion or respect for their fellow human beings. (We’ll discuss this more fully in Chapter 14.) Yet, journalism ethics is not a contradictory notion. Good journalists strive to do their jobs ethically and responsibly and to treat the people they write about with respect. They know they must think critically about how they go about their work, as well as how their work will affect the public and the subjects of their stories.

ETHICAL AND LEGAL CONSIDERATIONS Acting ethically as a journalist requires you to be thoughtful and deliberate about your actions. It requires you to choose among good and bad options – not only black and white choices, but gray ones, too. And it requires you to be able to justify and explain – not rationalize – the choices you’ve made.

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The ethical and moral issues you will face will come in many guises, and the size of your news organization or whether you write for print, broadcast or digital won’t matter. The things that will matter are: •• •• •• ••

The methods you use to gather information for your stories. The consideration you give to the people you write about. What’s appropriate to include, as well as what should be left out. Whether certain details enlighten and inform your audience, or whether they sensationalize or needlessly offend readers and viewers. •• Whether you go ahead with a story if you have personal, political or religious convictions that might cause readers to doubt your fairness or impartiality. You may also have legal considerations. Will your story damage someone’s reputation or standing in the community? If it does, can you verify its accuracy? Even if it’s verifiably true, is it something the public needs to know, or is it so personal and private that there’s no compelling reason to disclose it? These situations are complicated because you are not solely a journalist. You have family and social influences and interests; you may identify strongly with a particular religion or ethnic group. The combination of these attributes makes you unique, but they also influence your decision-making. Sometimes you will cover people or stories you don’t like or don’t agree with. If you’re the only reporter around when a sensitive story develops, you have to cover it fairly no matter how uncomfortable or unpleasant it may be. While you don’t always have control over the stories you’re assigned, you can control how you cover and present them. If you have a sound process for making ethical decisions, you can avoid at least some of the pitfalls that all journalists confront in their daily work. Chapter 10 focused on how to prepare yourself for unexpected stories that come your way. Preparing for ethical issues you may face is just as important. No one can anticipate everything, but the more you think ahead of time about the ethical dos and don’ts of journalism, the more you’ll be able to make sound and justifiable decisions when confronted with difficult situations and choices.

MAKING ETHICAL DECISIONS Even though no universal journalism code of conduct exists, most news organizations have adopted professional standards that

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provide guidance for how their journalists should go about their work. Many journalists use the code of ethics for the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ; www.spj.org/ethicscode-revision.asp) as a model for conduct and decision-making. The code – which was revised in 2014 for the first time since 1996 – covers four broad areas. Here’s a summary: •• Seek truth and report it. Be honest, fair and courageous in the way you report and present information. Get it right: Neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy. Use original sources as much as possible and verify what you learn. Seek multiple sources for your stories, and identify sources clearly. Don’t mislead or plagiarize, and avoid stereotypes. Give voice to the voiceless, and act as a watchdog over public affairs. Clearly identify and label advocacy and commentary. •• Minimize harm. Always treat sources, subjects of stories and colleagues with respect. Be sensitive toward those who may be adversely affected by news coverage and when dealing with children or people who have no experience with journalists. Remember that pursuing news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness. Understand that your stories may cause harm or discomfort, and do your best to limit the harm while remaining faithful to the facts. Don’t pander to lurid curiosity. •• Act independently. Your first obligation is to serve the public. Avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest. Be aware of associations or activities that might damage your and your organization’s integrity and credibility. Distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the line between the two. •• Be accountable and transparent. You have a duty to your audience to explain how you go about your work and how you make decisions. Admit mistakes and correct them quickly. Hold yourself to high standards and expose any unethical or questionable journalistic practices that you see. The SPJ code is voluntary. The standards at news organizations you work for may be more detailed, but all will be in agreement with the broad principles of fairness, accuracy, accountability and independence. Understand, too, that while the major principles reinforce each other, they can be in tension. The NPR code, for example, emphasizes that its principles are intended to provoke discussion and deliberation to help journalists think through difficult decisions and make good choices. (http://ethics.npr.org). Remember that, as confident as you

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might be about your decisions, talking with and listening to your editors and colleagues can bring insights and solutions that you might not come up with on your own. Two heads – or more – almost always are better than one head alone.

ASKING YOURSELF GOOD QUESTIONS In Chapter 5 we talked about how important it is for you to ask good questions when you interview someone. But it’s also important that you ask yourself good questions in order to make sound ethical decisions. Bob Steele is Distinguished Professor of Journalism Ethics at DePauw University in Indiana and also the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values at the Poynter Institute. He believes getting to a right decision takes more than common sense: It requires a process of reasoning and reflection in conjunction with ethical principles. To that end, he has compiled a list of questions to help journalists make sound ethical choices when faced with tough situations. The questions reflect many of the key points found in the SPJ code, and they can provide a strong basis for your analysis of methods, motives and possible effects of your work. When faced with a situation in which you’re uncertain about what to do, Steele said you should ask yourself: •• What do I know, and what do I need to know? •• What is my journalistic purpose? •• What organizational policies or professional guidelines should I consider? •• How can I bring people with different perspectives, backgrounds and ideas into my decision-making? •• Who will be affected by my decisions? •• How would I feel if roles were reversed and I was the subject of the story? •• What are the potential consequences of my actions? •• Are there ways I can minimize harm while remaining true to the facts of the story? •• Can I justify my actions to the public, the subjects of my story and my colleagues?3 Answering these questions can help you determine if the purpose behind your story is journalistically sound. If it is, decide how to fill

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any information gaps that exist. Make sure you’ve talked to people on all sides of the story so you present diverse viewpoints fairly. If your story can potentially cause harm, think about ways to minimize any harm while staying honest to the facts. You may be confident in your news judgment, but be aware that you have blind spots and biases, just like anyone else. Listen to ideas and suggestions from other reporters and editors who have different experiences from yours. The more brains involved, the more likely you are to make a sound decision that you can justify to your audience, your colleagues and yourself. Welcome feedback from readers, viewers and listeners. An honest dialog with your audience can open your eyes to blind spots that you and others in your organization may be unaware of. Even feedback that is highly critical or mean-spirited serves a purpose, and shows that people are paying attention to your work. After you’ve consulted professional codes, asked yourself the right questions and sought advice and guidance from others, you can be more assured about your choices. You’ll be able to explain your actions, confident that you’ve made thoughtful and proper decisions.

UNDERSTAND YOUR FIRST AMENDMENT PRIVILEGES – AND RESPONSIBILITIES Gorton and Prochaska were suspended from The Daily Illini, and a student task force was created to investigate how the decision to publish the cartoons was made and communicated internally. An unsigned editorial acknowledged that Gorton as editor-in-chief had final say over content, but emphasized he also had a responsibility to consult others before making a decision of such importance. The story captured national attention. The New York Times quoted Gorton as saying he regretted not discussing the issue more fully with his staff and that he wished the paper had provided more context and explanation. But he stood by his decision. “My first obligation is to the readers,” he said. “This is news.” While most major American newspapers, including the Times, stuck with their decision to not publish the cartoons, student newspapers at other universities responded in different ways. The Harvard Salient, a conservative biweekly, published four cartoons the day before the DI. Papers at Clemson, the University of Oregon and Illinois State University also published some of the cartoons. Newspapers at the University of

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North Carolina, the University of Arizona and Arizona State University published original cartoons that commented on the Danish cartoons. The independent student newspaper at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb published all 12 Danish cartoons on February 13, 2006. While two editors made the call at the DI, Derek Wright, the editorin-chief of The Northern Star, expanded his editorial board from five to 12 members to discuss the issue. The board voted 11–1 to run the cartoons. In a front-page editorial, editors called the cartoons tasteless, inappropriate and offensive. Nevertheless, they said they felt a responsibility to show readers the images. The cartoons ran on an inside news page and were packaged with a local reaction story and a column by the co-president of the Muslim Student Association. Wright said the reaction to the package was more positive than negative. He said Muslim groups disagreed with the decision but respected how the paper handled the matter. Wright said his staff was aware of the controversy at the DI. “We discussed whether we thought it was newsworthy enough or whether we were just screaming First Amendment, printing it just because we could,” Wright told The News-Gazette in Champaign, Ill. “We didn’t want to cause controversy just to be controversial.”4 Which leads us to the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. Appointed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Stewart was an ideological conservative who handed down centrist decisions during more than two decades on the court. He said the federal government could not ban abortions, but it did not have to pay for them. He said prayer in public schools was okay as long as it was not coerced. He opposed capital punishment but did not consider it unconstitutional. He was widely known for declaring that even though he couldn’t define pornography, he knew it when he saw it. Stewart was a champion of the rights of Americans as enumerated in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: The government cannot restrict or abridge freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or the freedom of the people to assemble and to petition their government for a redress of grievances. In 1971, in one of the court’s most important free-press rulings, he sided with the majority that allowed The New York Times and The Washington Post to publish articles based on secret Pentagon Papers about the origins of the Vietnam War. By a 6–3 vote, the court held that the U.S. government’s effort to block the articles before publication was unconstitutional. (The 2017 movie The Post tells this story, largely

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from the perspective of Post publisher Katharine Graham and Post editor Benjamin Bradlee. The movie actually underplays the Times’s leadership in verifying the documents and publishing them first.) Stewart recognized that the privileges the Founding Fathers gave the press carried obligations with them as well. In an interview after his retirement, Stewart talked about the Pentagon Papers ruling, and he said it was hard to imagine any justification short of national security for the government to block a story before publication, an act known as prior restraint. But, Stewart said, the constitutional freedoms that journalists enjoy do not absolve them of higher obligations to act responsibly and even, on occasion, to censor themselves. “Just because you have the right to do something,” he said, “doesn’t mean it’s right to do it.”5 The committee that revised the SPJ code in 2014 believed this point was so important that it added specific language that a legal right to publish information differs from an ethical justification to publish or broadcast it. Understanding this is key to fulfilling the pact that you as a journalist have with the public to provide information, understanding and enlightenment. It is not enough to say that you have a right to do something. You must also try to do the right thing. Some of your stories may anger readers and viewers: That comes naturally when you keep people informed. A certain amount of aggravation with the press is, in fact, one of the things that make this country great. But just because the First Amendment says you can do something doesn’t mean you should. A working knowledge of the First Amendment is essential. Good journalists understand their responsibility goes beyond constitutional protection. Take to heart your responsibility to keep people informed so they can understand their world, govern themselves effectively and make their lives and the lives of others better. And always remember this: The First Amendment applies to everyone, not just journalists. Stay humble. Looking back years later, Acton Gorton believed he was justified in publishing the cartoons. You may or may not agree with him; you may also find fault with how The Daily Illini subsequently handled the controversy. But he said the issue was always more than just the First Amendment. He felt it was a journalistic imperative for the DI to give people a way to make up their minds about the cartoons and to talk about what they meant and represented. He acknowledged, though, that more planning for the aftermath was needed. “I thought there would be some sort of earnest discussion about this, especially inside the college community,” he said. “It was really an opportunity that was wasted.”

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Gorton was eventually fired from the DI. In a May 2006 column published in The Torch, the journal of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, he wrote that the DI removed his original column from its website and enacted a prohibition on mentioning anything about the controversy in the paper. Readers searching the DI archives, he said, would only find criticisms of him and the opinions editor.6

CONCLUSION The First Amendment protects a free press from governmental interference. But it doesn’t require journalists to be fair, responsible, truthful, effective or even accurate. Yet they must be all those things – and more – if they are to do their work properly. If you accept the guarantee of freedom that the First Amendment provides, you must ply your craft ethically and fairly, honestly and thoughtfully. Ask yourself, your colleagues and your mentors whether you’re making the right decisions about what you choose to report or not report, whether you’re treating your sources fairly, whether you have a bias going into an assignment. You may need to wrestle with your decision. That’s okay. In this digital age, once something is published, it’s out there, pretty much forever. Take the time at the beginning to make sure the story is done accurately and fairly. Doing the right thing doesn’t mean choosing only the easy thing, or shying away from controversial or sensitive stories. Doing the right thing means thinking deliberately about what you do, and following standards and principles that will help ensure that you make right choices for the right reasons. Know what you have the right to do. But try to do the right thing as well.

 CHECKLIST •• Ask yourself good questions. Are you fulfilling your journalistic duty to the public? Have you considered the consequences of your actions? Have you brought people with different perspectives and experiences into your deliberations? •• Study the First Amendment. Journalists too often get hung up on the press clause and lose sight of how all of the Amendment’s rights are interconnected. Two good books to start with: Anthony Lewis’s Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A

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Biography of the First Amendment (Basic Books, 2008), and Floyd Abrams’s The Soul of the First Amendment (Yale, 2017). •• Study journalism ethics. If your school offers a journalism ethics class, take it even if it’s not required. If no such course is offered, begin an independent study. Good books to consider: The New Ethics of Journalism: Principles for the 21st Century (Kelly McBride and Tom Rosenstiel, editors, CQ Press, 2013); Journalism Ethics: Arguments and Cases for the 21st Century (Roger Patching and Martin Hirst, Routledge, 2013): Media Ethics: Issues & Cases (Philip Patterson and Lee Wilkins, McGraw-Hill, 2005). •• Keep the ethics discussions going with your classmates, co-workers and mentors. What sensitive issues have they faced in their work? How did they handle them, and what did they learn from the experience? What worked? What would they do differently? •• Be ethical; if it feels wrong, it is. Those were the words of Gene Patterson, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning editor and long-time chairman of the Poynter Institute. They were included in a column of his thoughts about journalism published after his death in 2013. In his 2014 commencement address to graduates of the Berkeley School of Journalism, New York Times media reporter David Carr cited a similar, simple formula that he called the “mom rule”: Don’t do anything you can’t explain to your mother.7

 ASSIGNMENTS The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists can be found at www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp and NPR’s code can be found at http://ethics.npr.org. Review each of these codes, and any other journalism codes of ethics that you’re familiar with, and make notes about the points you feel are most important. Then: 1. Create your own personal code of journalism ethics over the next week, emphasizing the steps you would take to adhere to each point in your version. 2. Use your code as a checklist for the next half-dozen stories you work on, and evaluate how closely you were able to follow it. What did you learn to do and not do? What missteps did you avoid? Did anything happen that you wish you could do over?

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  OTHER RESOURCES Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., is home of the Knight Chair in Journalism Ethics, which has been held over the years by Louis Hodges, Edward Wasserman and, most recently, Ali Colon. Bob Steele was the 2017 Ethics in Journalism keynote speaker, and his topic was “Reflecting Before Reacting: Why Ethics Matters.” Listen to his remarks at www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aZ8n81X6ww.

NOTES 1 Interview with Acton Gorton, September 9, 2010, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. His column about the cartoons ran on The Daily Illini Opinions page on February 9, 2006. “Two Daily Illini Editors Suspended From Jobs Other Staff Members Say They Were Left Out of Decision-Making Process,” The News-Gazette, February 15, 2006; “Paper Defends Decision to Run Cartoons,” The News-Gazette, February 10, 2006; Jodi Heckel, “Publisher Blasts Suspended Editor’s Decision in Letter,” The News-Gazette, February 18, 2006. The letters quoted ran on The Daily Illini’s Opinions page on February 10, 2006; Christine Won, “Quad Rally Denounces Hate,” The Daily Illini, February 15, 2006. 2 Kate Connolly, “Der Spiegel Says Top Journalist Faked Stories for Years,” the Guardian U.S., December 19, 2018; Christopher F. Schuetze, “Der Spiegel to Press Charges Against Reporter Who Made Up Articles,” The New York Times, December 23, 2018. 3 Bob Steele, “Ask These 10 Questions to Make Good Ethical Decisions,” pointer.org, August 13, 2002; Jay Black, Bob Steele, Ralph Barney, Doing Ethics in Journalism: A Handbook with Case Studies, Sigma Delta Chi Foundation, 1997. Steele also talked about the ten questions in a November 9, 2017, lecture at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va www. youtube.com/watch?v=0aZ8n81X6ww. 4 Monica Davey, “Illinois Student Paper Prints Muslim Cartoons, and Reaction Is Swift,” The New York Times, February 17, 2006; “Interview With Acton Gorton, Chuck Prochaska,” Big Story with John Gibson, Fox News, February 17, 2006; Jodi Heckel, “Daily Illini Not Only Paper to Decide to Run Controversial Cartoons,” The News-Gazette, February 18, 2006: Edward R. Drachman and Robert Langran, You Decide: Controversial Cases in American Politics, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. 5 Robert Bendiner, “The Law and Potter Stewart: An Interview with Justice Potter Stewart,” American Heritage Magazine, December 1983. 6 Gorton interview, September 9, 2010, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition; “Acton Gorton’s Truly Astonishing Experience,” thefire.org, May 10, 2006. 7 “Gene Patterson’s final thoughts on journalism: ‘Get Over the Pain, New Stuff Happens’,” poynter.org, January 13, 2013; Carr’s advice came in his February 15, 2015, commencement address at the Berkeley School of Journalism.

14

Remember Your Humanity

Just a few minutes after the start of the November 5, 2017, morning service at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, a man drove up and parked his SUV outside the church door. He wore black tactical gear and a skull mask, and he carried a military-style rifle. He shot two people outside the church, then went inside and walked up and down the aisle firing on worshippers in the pews. When he left the church, a neighbor armed with a semi-automatic rifle shot him twice. The gunman fired back and fled in his SUV, with the neighbor and a bystander pursuing in a truck. The gunman eventually wrecked, and police found him dead in his vehicle. His third and fatal wound was a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. At the church, authorities counted the dead: 23 people inside, two outside. One person died at a hospital; 20 were injured. Ten women, seven men, seven girls, one boy, and an unborn child were killed. The oldest victim was 77. One victim was the 14-year-old daughter of the church’s pastor, who was elsewhere that morning. The guest pastor was killed, along with eight family members, including his unborn grandchild. The attack was the deadliest mass shooting by one person in Texas and, at the time, the fifth-deadliest mass shooting in the United States. And the news media rushed to the scene, just as they did after earlier attacks in Las Vegas, Nev.; Orlando, Fla.; San Bernardino, Calif.; Charleston, S.C.; Newtown, Conn.; Aurora, Colo.; Blacksburg, Va.; and Columbine, Colo. And just as they would the next year after shootings at a high school in Parkland, Fla., and a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

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Sutherland Springs was different, smaller: a rural unincorporated community (population 600) 20 miles east of San Antonio, with a post office, a Dollar General, a couple of convenience stores, and no stoplights. It consisted, one reporter wrote, of “three square blocks of homes in which nearly every person lost someone.” Texas newspaper and TV reporters arrived first, quickly followed by national and international news organizations. Before long, it seemed that the media outnumbered residents. The main intersection was packed with news vans and satellite trucks, and dozens of news crews lined both sides of the main road. Reporters trampled on the lawns of homes near the church and began knocking on doors trying to find someone, anyone, who could give a quote or go on camera. One reporter finished an interview with a wounded survivor in her trailer home. When he got up to leave, the trailer door swung open and a “swarm” of journalists poured in. A photographer began taking the woman’s picture without her permission. A television crew pressed her for an interview as she tended her wound. Residents began to hole up in their houses, knowing that venturing out to the Dollar General or the convenience store would attract a horde of reporters. “My one-year-old can’t sleep because of all the noise,” said a resident whose mobile home was next to the crime scene. “If he’s up, we’re up.” Residents put “No Trespassing” signs in their yards to keep reporters and photographers away. “They’re vultures, man,” another resident said after a memorial service. “It’s great that you want to hear our story but when you’re at a memorial you have no respect. You’re walking around with cameras shining in people’s faces. We’re not here for some festival,” he continued. “We’re here because of something the likes of this town, Sutherland Springs, never thought they’d see.”1

Journalism in the 21st century has undergone radical changes. More and more, people rely on digital rather than print or broadcast as a primary source for their news and information. Social media has tightened reporting deadlines from hours and minutes to seconds. News organizations have changed business models and invented new ones. Once well-defined lines between straight news and commentary and advocacy have blurred, often to partisan ends. Despite the changes, at least one thing remains constant: journalism is storytelling, and people are what those stories are all about. At the core of every story you do, there will be – or should be – real people, with real

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experiences, achievements, disappointments, joys and sadness. And you must view those people as subjects worthy of your respect. You should consider it an honor and a privilege to tell their stories. Be aware, though, that the stories you produce have moral and ethical dimensions because of how they affect the real people you write about. The people in your stories may come up to you on the street or call, text or get in touch on social media to talk or ask about something you wrote. Sometimes they’ll compliment you and you’ll feel flattered; other times, they’ll question why you wrote something the way you did, or ask why you included a particular detail. Some may wonder about your approach and question your motives. Your story may have made them angry or caused them pain or distress. And they may ask: “why did you do something like that?” Reporters assume an awesome responsibility when writing about people who, sometimes for reasons beyond their control, briefly enter the public eye. Understand that your stories could have repercussions beyond anything that you might intend or imagine. Never lose sight of the humanity of the people you encounter and write about, regardless of the circumstances. Never forget the common bonds that tie all of us together, and keep in mind that whatever happened to the people in your stories could also happen to you or someone you know. Ask yourself these questions about your stories: •• •• •• •• ••

How would you want to be treated if the tables were turned? Would you object to the way the story was presented? Would you object to the details that were included? Would you wonder why some important facts were left out? How would you feel?

Treat others the way you want to be treated. That’s the Golden Rule,2 in life as well as in journalism, and it pertains to the people you meet and write about day in and day out. Living the Golden Rule as a journalist requires, quite simply, that you empathize with the people you write about. Recognizing the humanity of each individual – even if you disagree with them – will enable you to approach people and their stories with compassion, respect and honesty.

LEARNING EMPATHY Etan Patz was six years old when he begged his parents to let him walk from their home in lower Manhattan to catch the school bus.

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It was only two blocks, he was a good kid, and he lived in a close-knit neighborhood; his parents said okay. A woman and a mail carrier saw him waiting to cross an intersection. After that no one saw him again. Police appealed to the public for leads and set up a toll-free number that received calls from as far away as California. Neighbors and volunteers plastered the city with posters bearing Etan’s picture. Local and national media gave the story nonstop coverage for weeks. His disappearance sparked a national missing children’s movement, and Etan became the first missing child to be pictured on a milk cartoon. May 25, the day he vanished, was designated National Missing Children’s Day in 1983, four years after he left home for the last time. Anna Quindlen wrote about Etan’s disappearance when she was a reporter for The New York Times. His story haunted her, and she wrote about it again in 2004 in a column headlined “The Great Obligation.” In it, she reflected on journalistic responsibility and how so many reporters had disgraced the profession by lying, making stuff up and disrespecting the people they wrote about. “Reporters are often asked about their obligation to readers,” she wrote, “but perhaps the most important obligation is the one we owe the subjects of our stories.” This obligation, she said, goes beyond just getting the facts right. It extends to bringing understanding and respect to the often heart-breaking news about their lives. She cited Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam, who said he learned that lesson as a young reporter writing obituaries for The Tennessean in Nashville. Accuracy was important, but so was sensitivity and compassion. “For most people it was the one time they got their name in print,” Halberstam recalled. “If you got something wrong you could cause enormous pain to ordinary people.” “All this makes you wonder if journalism schools should teach not just accuracy, but empathy,” Quindlen wrote. Quindlen wondered if all good journalists have a moment when humanity and the story merge indelibly. It may come when they’re writing about people who have endured a crisis or a personal loss, sometimes of an almost unbearable magnitude. For her it came in writing about Etan Patz.3 Douglas Pardue’s career changed when he covered a similar story. He was a young reporter in Maryland; like many, he thought writing about politics and government was what he was meant to do. Then he was assigned the story of a missing ten-year-old girl. Authorities found her books near her school bus stop. Over the next few days, search parties found her coat, her dress and then her underclothes.

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Pardue got to know the girl’s father. When talking to him, Pardue kept his questions about the girl in the present tense even though he knew she was very likely dead. “What”, Pardue asked, “does your daughter want to be when she grows up?” The father opened up his wallet to a picture of his little girl and held it up to Pardue’s face: “I just want to see her grow up.” A search party found her body not long afterward. She had been raped and strangled. “I knew right there that was the kind of story I wanted to do,” Pardue said. Not because I like to see people in pain. But for the first time I realized that people were what reporting is all about . . . I no longer gave a damn about what a politician said, only what he did . . . I only care about how what they do affects people. What distinguishes really good reporters, Pardue said, is the “human factor,” never losing the awareness that “you’re telling stories about individual people and truly caring about the story that the person is telling. You’ve got to be really interested in the person.”4 You don’t learn empathy by reading or studying stories, Quindlen said. You get it by covering them, by imagining yourself in the place of the people you interview and write about. Years after his son disappeared, Etan’s father still clipped stories about the case, even though his original reason – to give them to Etan when he returned home – was gone. “I leave you with that image for those times when you think what you do is fleeting,” Quindlen wrote, addressing reporters. “The closest thing this man has to the body of his son is the body of your work. If that doesn’t make you want to do better, find another job.” Etan Patz was declared legally dead 22 years after he disappeared. In 2017, a bodega stock clerk who confessed to luring the boy into a basement and attacking him was convicted of kidnapping and murder. The man was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. Etan’s body was never found.

 TIPS FROM YOUNGER JOURNALISTS: YOU’RE DEALING WITH PEOPLE’S LIVES It’s important to treat people as people. The biggest part of my job involves talking to people usually in extraordinarily bad situations. I try to make sure they’re okay first, to see if they’re

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even in a position to talk. I don’t just launch into it. I have to remember this person is going through the unthinkable and put myself there as a person . . . Later, when you do write the story, say thank you for taking the time to talk to me. This was your clip on the air. Thanks for sharing with me. It’s important to circle back and say thank you. Christina Zdanowicz, senior producer Social Discovery team, CNN The people in your stories are real. People are going to hear the stories, and know who they’re about. You have to be careful how you treat people in a story. You can get in these long conversations about plot and story structure, but you have to be true to their story. You can’t just shape it so it sounds good. Emily Siner, news director, Nashville Public Radio At a small-town paper, you have to cover death a lot. It makes you question your morals a bit, to have to knock on doors and talk to them about someone who just passed away and then have to turn around a story. But do things your way and not always the editor’s way. Sometimes they want me to call right away. But can I wait three or four hours? Take the time because it’s a lot for a family to process. Try not to be like a vulture, but get to know this family and understand their needs. Their lives matter. You can’t just pop in and pop out on the worst day of their lives. Megan Jones, reporter, Chicago Tribune Media Group We get to tell these important stories. I get to do this as my job. I get to explore things. You have to take it very, very seriously. It’s so easy to not recognize that we have power and responsibility, and you can destroy a person’s life. If the story is going to damage someone, I’ll not do the story. I’m not about exploiting people’s pain for my gain . . . A lot of times you face pressure to be first but it’s not always worth it. You can do more damage than good. Journalism is about being responsible. You’re dealing with people’s lives. Maria Ines Zamudio, immigration reporter, WBEZ Chicago Covering crime in Chicago grounded me in how much I still didn’t know about reporting and breaking news and how to approach

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somebody in a traumatic situation, which is something you have to do. It’s really hard, but you don’t get better at it unless you keep doing it. In these situations you have to be so much more human. You have no idea what they’re going through. But you want their voice in the story because without it it’s just going to be so-andso, another victim of crime. That’s not the way we want to write about someone in the paper. Reema Amin, reporter, Chalkbeat New York5

“MEDIA GO HOME. LEAVE US ALONE” It’s the job of news organizations to respond when disaster strikes. But the role of local news media is different from that of national publications and networks because local journalists are intimately familiar with the communities and the people who have been affected. In April 2007, a gunman killed 32 Virginia Tech students and faculty members before taking his own life. At the time it was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, and it thrust the Blacksburg campus into an international spotlight. Stories of media malfeasance soon emerged. Packs of national reporters and photographers, many of them unwilling to take “no comment” for an answer, besieged students. Tracy Samantha Schmidt, then a reporter for Time, heard a reporter from Kentucky hollering to a crowd of students: “I need a student from Kentucky. Anyone from Kentucky?”6 Camera crews swarmed around a sobbing student on the drill field and kept their cameras running when she asked them to leave her alone. One national journalist presented himself as a family member to get into a hospital room for an interview. The Roanoke Times operated a bureau near the Tech campus. Managing editor Carole Tarrant directed her staff to tell the story as thoroughly as possible, but to do it with respect, acknowledging the community’s grief and pain and knowing that the local reporters would still be around when the satellite trucks and the national press moved on.7 Donna Alvis-Banks, one of the Times’s lead reporters on the story, had grown up in the area and knew it well. It was a big story, she said, “but you didn’t want to do more harm. You needed to take care of your community.” Alvis-Banks tried to put herself in the place of the victims and survivors and their families. She told them upfront who she was when she approached them to talk. If they wanted to be left alone, all they had

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to do was tell her. By mid-week, though, many students and residents simply refused to talk to any reporters, local or not. People posted signs that read, “Media go home. Leave us alone.” “The other media made it hard for us,” Alvis-Banks said.8 After the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., a camera crew rang the doorbells of parents whose children had been killed seeking interviews. Other reporters went from table to table at a local restaurant asking diners and wait-staff to share their feelings on camera. One resident said a television network reporter tried to get an interview by saying she was a friend of the mother of a slain child; the reporter brought along a plant as a gift. Those actions and others prompted the Newtown Bee to post a statement on its Facebook page: On behalf of the entire staff of The Bee – we are imploring ALL our colleagues and journalists to PLEASE STAY AWAY FROM THE VICTIMS. We acknowledge it is your right to try and make contact, but we beg you to do what is right and let them grieve and ready their funeral plans in peace. “Our mission is primarily to serve our community,” Editor Curtiss Clark said. “And you don’t do that by trampling on people’s privacy.”9 After the 2015 murders of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., the Post and Courier tried to balance its obligation to cover the story thoroughly with sensitivity for the city’s grief. Reporters knew some facts before they were publicly disclosed, but the paper decided not to publish them because the risk of getting something wrong and causing more pain was too great. And it chose not to run a photograph of the accused killer on its front page. “Having that on a newsstand for families and everyone else who were impacted by that seemed like the wrong thing to do,” executive editor Mitch Pugh said. You’re hoping that you strike the appropriate tone, you’re hoping that you’re not a source of pain for people, you’re hoping that you’re a source of information and a little bit of optimism, I guess, in the middle of all this.10 The hope, too, is that you’ll never have to cover anything like what happened at Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Charleston, Sutherland

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Springs or Parkland and Pittsburgh. (The greater hope: that such events never happen again.) But disasters and traumatic events inevitably will occur, and it will be the responsibility of journalists like you to report what happened, accurately and fairly, and with empathy and compassion. The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma (http://dartcenter. org) is a project of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and serves as a resource center for reporters who cover violence, conflict and tragedy in the U.S. and around the world. Its resources include guides for how to report stories responsibly and how to treat victims and survivors with dignity and compassion. Here are some of its tips for journalists: •• People who have suffered trauma have the right to decline to be interviewed, photographed or filmed. Respect that right, and do no further harm. •• Be accurate, and offer sincere condolences. Don’t ask, “How do you feel?” or say, “I know how you feel.” You don’t know how they feel. •• Witnesses and survivors may be in shock in the immediate aftermath and may not be able to give informed consent to an interview. Go easy on them. •• Resist the “pack” mentality of chasing stories that all the other reporters are chasing. •• Don’t try to trick, coerce or cajole victims into talking with you. •• Be as respectful and gentle as possible, even on deadline. Treat victims and survivors as you would like to be treated if the situation was reversed. •• Do not be the one to relay the news of a death to a family or an individual. Authorities have that responsibility, and the family deserves to receive that news in private. •• Check and re-check facts, names, times – everything. Such errors cause additional stress and pain for survivors and the families of victims.

CONCLUSION News coverage of the killings in Sutherland Springs included many poignant and sensitive accounts from survivors and the families of victims. But, like previous episodes in other grief-stricken communities, the bad behavior of some journalists left a vivid impression as well. And not just on the people who lived in Sutherland Springs.

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James Miller covered the story for The Mesquite, the student newspaper at Texas A&M University at San Antonio. It was, he wrote, exciting, sobering, fast moving – and disgusting. He interviewed residents who talked about the overwhelming number of reporters who made constant demands for interviews and video. His verdict on press behavior? “The actions of the media in Sutherland Springs were questionable and borderline immoral.” The press had a responsibility to tell the story of what happened, he said. “At what point, however, do we as members of the media weigh the damage we cause in such a pursuit? How do we balance telling a story with the causing of tangible harm?”11 Two New York Times journalists raised similar concerns about press behavior. Reporter Simon Romero had covered earthquakes, hurricanes and fires, but nothing prepared him for the “media maelstrom” in Sutherland Springs. Ignoring what happened there was not an option. But, he wrote, Maybe it’s time we also discuss how it’s covered on the ground . . . What’s the best way to fulfill the public’s right to know when it means intruding on private citizens’ pain? I wish I had an answer. But accepting responsibility for damage done at such moments might be a starting point for one.12 Times photographer Todd Heisler wrote about what it’s like to cover stories that are centered in human suffering. As a journalist he had seen it before, but I must always remember that the people going through it have not. Because of this, it is important to make images that go beyond grief and crime scenes. Step back. Give a sense of place. Show not just what a scene looks like, but, more important, what it feels like. Get what you need and move on.13 Lauren McGaughy of the Dallas Morning News arrived in Sutherland Springs just a few hours after the massacre at the church, one of a handful of local reporters on the scene. By the next morning, hundreds of journalists were there, from around the country and around the world. Soon, she wrote, “It was an invasion. It was too much.” As a reporter, she was accustomed to being crammed into scrums of reporters who were competing for interviews. “Yet I was absolutely overwhelmed in Sutherland Springs. I was sickened,” she wrote in a

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column four days after the killings. “I can’t imagine how you, a grieving community, must have felt. You’re more than a hashtag.” She continued: As journalists, our role as observers and investigators in times of tragedy is important. But so is our empathy and our humanity. As a profession, we must have a conversation about how best to chronicle horrors like this. We can do better. To the families who opened up to us and put up with me, thank you. The media horde, myself included, owe you an apology. I hope you’ll soon find a quiet moment in which to mourn.14 You may never have thought of empathy or the Golden Rule as essential to your work as a journalist. But they are. You’re writing about real people and telling stories about what happened to them. Remain true to the facts of those stories, but treat the people you write about with empathy and do your best to minimize harm, even when it’s hard or seems impossible, or when a deadline pulls you in another direction. You’re in a profession in which you get to tell people’s stories. What an honor that is. Craft those stories honestly and fairly, but with compassion and – most importantly – with humanity.

 CHECKLIST •• Treat people with respect and dignity. You may be catching people at their most vulnerable. Be thoughtful and considerate. If they’ve experienced the death of a family member or friend, don’t be afraid to express sorrow, but don’t say you understand how they feel because you don’t. Recognize that people have their limits, and know when to back off. •• Remember the humanity of the people you write about. You can’t ignore how a person died, but don’t lose sight of how she lived her life. Encourage people to tell you those life stories. Try to find out what made the person unique. •• Be sensitive about what to include and what to leave out. Details are important to your story, but recognize the difference between what’s pertinent and what may be simply sensational. Leave out gratuitous details that could be offensive. •• Get it right. Accuracy is the foundation of what you do as a journalist. It’s especially important if you’re writing about someone who has died. Double-check facts and details.

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•• Know your own limits. An emotional story will take its toll on you, too. Rest when you can. Don’t be ashamed to talk about your feelings with a colleague or a supervisor. Seek professional counseling if you feel overwhelmed by your experiences. •• Remember the Golden Rule. Ask yourself how you would feel if the story were about someone you cared about.

 ASSIGNMENT Stories about death and personal tragedies are among the most difficult for journalists, so you must learn how to approach them properly. Spend a week reading local and national news sites and compile a file of the stories that deal with those topics. 1. Study how the stories treat the people involved. Did the writer show compassion toward the subjects while trying to remain faithful to the facts? Were some details questionable or objectionable? If so, why do you think the writer included them? Were they essential or sensational? How would you have felt if the story were about someone you knew? 2. Consult the SPJ Code of Ethics and the guidelines for reporters put together by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Pay particular attention to sections about minimizing harm. Do the stories you studied comply with the guidelines? Detail in writing how the stories measure up to those standards.

  OTHER RESOURCES The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma grew out of a program to help college journalism students learn how to report on victims of violence with sensitivity and dignity. Since 1994, the Dart Award for Excellence in Reporting on Victims of Violence has recognized outstanding stories dealing with the impact of violence and traumatic incidents on individuals, families and communities. You can read the winning entries on the center’s website – https://dartcenter.org – and find helpful tipsheets for many topics. Katherine Reed is a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. She’s a former fellow at the Dart Center and teaches a course on covering traumatic events. In the aftermath of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, she wrote a column critical of how many news organizations cover such events. It’s worth your time: https://

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ethics.journalism.wisc.edu/2017/10/09/stop-scrambling-for-whyand-stop-calling-them-shooters.

NOTES 1 Lauren McGaughy, J. David McSwane, “‘Sutherland Springs’ Morning of Horror: One Lone Gunman, Two Strangers and a Broken Town,” The Dallas Morning News, November 6, 2017; Dakin Andone, Kaylee Hartung, Darran Simon, “At Least 26 People Killed in Shooting at Texas Church,” CNN, November 6, 2017; Matthew Haag, “Sutherland Springs: A Post Office, No Traffic Light and Now a Mass Murder,” The New York Times, November 5, 2017; James Miller, “Viewpoint: Media Maelstrom in Sutherland Springs Raises Concern,” The Mesquite, November 11, 2017; Lauren McGaughy, “Dear Sutherland Springs: You Deserve An Apology from the News Media,” The Dallas Morning News, November 9, 2017; Simon Romero, “The Harm Journalists Can Do,” The New York Times, November 15, 2017. 2 www.teachingvalues.com/goldenrule.html. Variations of the Golden Rule can be found in most world religions. 3 Anna Quindlen, “The Great Obligation,” Newsweek, April 19, 2004. 4 Douglas Pardue interviews, March 24, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition; and July 13, 2018. 5 Interviews with Christina Zdanowicz, July 20, 2018; Emily Siner, June 24, 2018; Megan Jones, July 16, 2018; Maria Ines Zamudio, June 16, 2018; Reema Amin, June 27, 2018. 6 Interview with Tracy Schmidt, January 25, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. 7 Interview with Carole Tarrant, September 1, 2008, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. 8 Interview with Donna Alvis-Banks, September 1, 2008, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition. 9 Rachel Aviv, “A Community Newspaper Covers a National Tragedy,” The New Yorker, March 4, 2013; Julie Moos, “How The Newtown Bee is Covering Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting,” poynter.org, December 15, 2012; Michael Eng, “Newtown Bee Keeps Town at Heart in Sandy Hook Coverage,” Plant City Observer, December 20, 2012. 10 Ravi Somaiya, “At Charleston Newspaper, Covering the News, and Choking Back Tears,” The New York Times, June 24, 2015. 11 Miller, “Viewpoint: Media Maelstrom in Sutherland Springs Raises Concern,” The Mesquite, November 11, 2017. 12 Romero, “The Harm Journalists Can Do,” The New York Times, November 15, 2017. 13 Todd Heisler, “Photographing Tragedy, With Respect,” The New York Times, November 20, 2017. 14 McGaughy, “Dear Sutherland Springs: You Deserve An Apology from the News Media,” The Dallas Morning News, November 9, 2017.

15 Stand Your Ground The headline on the lead editorial in the print edition of the Denver Post’s April 8, 2018, Sunday opinion section was big and bold: “News matters: Colo. should demand the newspaper it deserves.” The online headline was blunter: “As vultures circle, the Denver Post must be saved.” And the editorial was clear about who it considered the vultures to be: executives at Alden Global Capital, the NewYork-based hedge fund that owned the paper. On the following Monday, the editorial said, more than two-dozen reporters, editors, photographers, videographers, page designers, digital producers and opinion staff would leave the paper, and not by choice. Digital First Media, an Alden subsidiary and the country’s third largest newspaper group, had ordered the Post to reduce its news staff by 30; this came on top of mandated cuts since 2010 that had reduced newsroom numbers from 250 to 100. At the same time, analysts said the hedge fund’s newspapers were making money, with some earning profits of 20 percent and higher. The editorial accused Alden of pumping hundreds of millions of dollars of newspaper profits into “shaky investments” that had nothing to do with journalism. The editorial was not subtle: Denver and Colorado deserved a newspaper owner that cared about and supported its newsroom. “If Alden isn’t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell The Post to owners who will.” At the time, the Post had a daily circulation of 170,000 and 8.5 million unique monthly visitors. It had won nine Pulitzer Prizes, and four in a row from 2010 – for feature photography – to 2013, when it won for its breaking news coverage of the mass shooting at a movie

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theater in nearby Aurora. But that kind of coverage would not, could not, continue under Alden, the editorial said. “When newsroom owners view profits as the only goal, quality, reliability and accountability suffer. Their very mission is compromised . . . We get it that things change,” the editorial said, acknowledging the financial realities of the news business in the 21st century. But we’ve been quiet too long . . . The smart money is that in a few years The Denver Post will be rotting bones. And a major city in an important political region will find itself without a newspaper. It’s time for those Coloradans who care most about their civic future to get involved and see to it that Denver gets the newsroom it deserves.1 Chuck Plunkett, the Post’s editorial page editor, orchestrated the section, which included nine locally written op-ed columns about the importance of a strong hometown newspaper. Plunkett didn’t give corporate executives a heads-up before the section was published online, and he didn’t alert the Post’s chief editor because the paper’s news and opinion sections were independent of each other. The Denver Rebellion, as it came to be called, drew national attention. “I had to do it because it was the right thing to do,” Plunkett told The New York Times. “If that means I lose my job trying to stand up for my readers, then that means I’m not working for the right people anyway.” A month later, the editorial page editor at the Daily Camera in nearby Boulder, a paper also owned by Alden, wrote a column highly critical of the hedge fund. When his publisher rejected the piece, the editor self-published it on a blog, and was fired. Plunkett came to the Daily Camera editor’s defense. A newspaper’s owner has the right to reject stories and editorials, he wrote, but the demands of transparency and responsible behavior require journalists to shine a spotlight on their own management when necessary. He renewed his call for Alden to reinvest in its newsrooms or “release us to better ownership.” Corporate management killed Plunkett’s piece. Plunkett said there was talk of moving him off the editorial page and back into the newsroom. He resigned instead. Two other senior editors quit soon

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afterward, and the former owner of the Post, who had served as a member of the editorial board after his retirement, also resigned. “I was boxed in so that I couldn’t speak,” Plunkett said.2

Other journalists around the country have quit or been fired for refusing to compromise on what they considered to be matters of principle. An editor at the El Paso Times in Texas put his position on a list of layoffs ordered by corporate owners. Another editor at OC Weekly, an alternative paper in Southern California, quit when his bosses rejected cost-cutting ideas he offered in lieu of staff layoffs.3 Justin Simmons was a video editor at KHGI in Kearney, Neb., when Sinclair Broadcast Group bought the station in 2016. He was soon promoted to producer, which meant he had some management responsibilities. Sinclair, the country’s largest owner of local television outlets, routinely required its stations to run corporate produced news packages and commentaries that leaned to the right politically. Local news teams complied with the orders, but many complained that the required packages often cut significantly into the time the stations could devote to local news. Then, in early 2018, Sinclair required news anchors at all its stations to read a corporate-written script attacking other news outlets for producing “biased and false news.” No changes or omissions were allowed. A Deadspin video montage of anchors at dozens of stations all reciting the same words went viral, sparking criticism and mockery of the company’s mandate (www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo). Even though many of the local anchors objected, their hands were tied because of strict contracts with significant financial penalties for non-compliance. Simmons had freedom that others didn’t because he had not signed a contract when Sinclair bought his station, and he planned not to run the required segment. But his boss told him that if it didn’t run, the boss – not Simmons – would lose his job. That made Simmons angry. He resigned and wrote about the ethical quandary that Sinclair had created for its journalists. If I don’t take a stand, he figured, who will?4 Sunny Dhillon, a reporter at The Globe and Mail in Canada, was assigned a follow-up to October 2018 elections in Vancouver in which a nearly all-white council was elected, even though 45 percent of the city’s residents were of Asian descent. (The one elected nonwhite councilor was of Caribbean heritage.) Editors at their morning planning meeting had focused on the new council’s ethnic makeup,

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and Dhillon pursued that angle. But 90 minutes before his deadline, he wrote, an editor told him to focus less on race and more on the fact that eight of the ten council members were women. Dhillon told the editor that his story would of course report the election of the eight women. But, Dhillon said, the public discussion he found in his reporting seemed to focus more on who was not represented than on who was. He told the editor he thought it was a mistake to downplay the racial angle. The editor said what Dhillon thought didn’t matter; the newsroom was not a democracy. Dhillon realized she was right, and resigned. “What I brought to the newsroom did not matter,” he wrote in a column explaining his decision. It was at that moment that being a person of colour at a paper and in an industry that does not have enough of us – particularly at the top – felt more futile than ever before . . . I hope in writing publicly about this that I can have more of a positive impact than I feel I’ve had in recent years. And if this post provides any support or comfort for other journalists of colour, or empowers them to share similar experiences, all the better. Dhillon ended by apologizing to people he’d interviewed for stories that would never run. “I am sorry for taking up your time.”5 Quitting a journalism job as a matter of principle is nothing new. Just months after winning a 2008 Pulitzer Prize, Maurice Possley left the Chicago Tribune because he was convinced the paper’s commitment to criminal justice journalism was flagging.6 Ann Marie Lipinski, the Tribune’s editor, also resigned in 2008 because she disagreed with the direction that new management wanted to take the paper.7 Joshua Prager, a senior writer in the Wall Street Journal’s New York City investigative unit, resigned in 2009 because, as he wrote in a memo obtained by Politico, he believed the future of long-form journalism was at risk under the regime of Rupert Murdoch, who was then the new owner of the Journal. “Among the many things I learned here is that reporters need to fight for themselves,” Prager wrote. “And I hope that my incredible colleagues, despite their understandable fears given the state of our industry, will find ways to speak up when necessary.”8 Sometimes, the reason is more personal, even a matter of faith. Gene Owens had been editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times for eight years when he resigned. A Jehovah’s Witness, Owens wrote in a final column that his faith taught that a person cannot split his or her life along religious and secular tracks. But that was what

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Owens felt his job as an editorialist required. He chose editorial writing as a young journalist because it was “an honorable calling,” one that provided a good living and led to lasting friendships. But it didn’t match what his faith demanded. “Out of the secular side of my mouth I have been recommending that people put their faith in human policies and the political systems behind them,” he wrote. Out of the religious side of my mouth, I have been telling people that these policies are doomed to failure and the systems behind them are doomed to destruction . . . It was then that I realized the need for a change in my relationship with Jehovah and his Christ. It was a change that would require me to give up something dear to me: my career as an opinion writer, and a profitable relationship with an enlightened, tolerant and honorable corporation . . . I hope that with this career move I can put my religious and secular lives on parallel tracks. I pray that the destination will be a happy one. God bless you all.9

WHAT DO YOU STAND FOR? As a beginning journalist, you may not have spent a lot of time thinking about what you might do when forced to take a stand on principle. That’s understandable: You’re focused on honing the skills you need to launch your career. At some point, though, you may find yourself in a situation where you’re asked or expected to do something that, in good conscience, you simply cannot do. You may be asked to go along with something that deep down you find objectionable or that crosses a line. It may not even require an action on your part; it may be a matter of simply acquiescing to the status quo, or turning a blind eye to improper behavior or questionable conduct. There will always be assignments that you would gladly hand over to someone else. You may cover stories about violence, tragedy or trauma that stick with you for years, just as they did for Anna Quindlen and Douglas Pardue. You may question your own faith or values when you write about poverty, illness and despair. It’s natural to identify with the pain and anguish of the real people you write about (that’s the humanity we talked about in Chapter 14), and you may wonder if you can face another story about something bad that has happened to innocent people. But journalists have a responsibility to report on disturbing events. You can’t – and shouldn’t – ignore them. Talk over

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any misgivings you have with your editor and colleagues. They may have faced similar issues on other assignments, and they can help you find a way to handle a difficult story sensitively and professionally. You must, however, distinguish between the painful stories that all journalists face and matters of conscience and principle. What will happen when you are confronted with a situation that requires you to take a stand that might cost you your beat, or even your job? Are you willing to take a stand as a matter of journalistic principle? Will you listen to your conscience, or will you be swayed by other considerations? Examine your positions carefully, and answer these questions as honestly as you can when you’re confronted with such a troubling issue: •• What do you stand for? Don’t be vague about matters of conscience and principle. What are the rights and wrongs that are involved? Enunciate anything that troubles you in as much detail as possible. •• Why do you feel this way? Are you being asked to violate professional values? Are there personal values – religious, ethical, social, political, family – that are at stake? Again, detail these principles as clearly and completely as you can. Weigh your values and beliefs carefully. •• What are the other sides of the issue? Your editors and colleagues may have different positions. Talk to them about your concerns, and listen to their positions with an open mind. Their reasoning may convince you. •• Are there ways to compromise that alleviate your concerns? Is there a middle ground that would satisfy you and your bosses? Most importantly, what will best serve the public interest, while doing minimum harm? •• What happens if, after weighing all the options, you say no? Will you simply be removed from the assignment, or will you face more serious consequences such as suspension, firing or resigning? Are you willing to go that far? The answers may not be easy, but maintaining your integrity requires you to confront these kinds of issues forthrightly.

 TIPS FROM YOUNGER JOURNALISTS: DON’T BE AFRAID TO SPEAK UP You’re your best advocate. If you have a valuable point, don’t be afraid to say it. You’re a unique person. No one else may

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be thinking what you’re thinking. It’s important to use your identity and your experiences . . . Go for it. Especially women. Especially even more for women of color. You can get caught up in “not good enough.” Women have to fit almost every criteria for a job. If it’s something you want, go for it. Candice Norwood, web producer/writer, Governing magazine On applying for a new job: I told myself I really hope they give me a shot. When I walked into the newsroom for the interview, I said, Janelle, be more confident than you feel right now. Put it out there that you’re qualified. Show them how much you want it. Janelle O’Dea, data reporter, St. Louis Post-Dispatch For reporters of color, find something you can be master of and go full force. Maria Zamudio, immigration reporter, WBEZ Chicago On dealing with supervisors: Some male editors take the tougher stories and automatically give them to men because they think they can “handle it” better. I had a boss who would clap his hands in my face and go, “Type faster!” Dealing with that was not something I expected. I expect it from crazy people, not your boss. I told him I’m writing my story. The more you distract me, the longer it’s going to take. I made it clear I didn’t find it funny what he was doing. Megan Jones, reporter, Chicago Tribune Media Group10

PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL INTEGRITY This book has examined how ethical guidelines provide a template for how journalists should conduct themselves. The rules deal with things you must do (get the facts right, explain how you got your

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information, be fair and balanced, treat sources and subjects of stories with respect), as well as things that are prohibited (making things up, presenting another person’s work as your own, misleading your readers or viewers with words or images, sensationalizing or blowing things out of proportion). Apart from the professional codes, you should develop personal standards that determine not only what you will do but also what you will not do, even if it costs you a promotion or your job. No matter where your personal code takes you, your standards should start with a sense of personal and professional integrity. The SPJ code says an ethical journalist acts with integrity. The code for the American Society of News Editors says journalism demands integrity as well as industry and knowledge. NPR’s code says the ethical foundation that journalists bring to their work is the single best safeguard of integrity. The dictionary definition of integrity is basic: “the quality or state of being of sound moral principle; uprightness, honesty and sincerity.” The word comes from the same Latin root as the word integer, which means something that is complete. The adjective integral means something that is necessary or essential for completeness. Law professor, cultural critic and novelist Stephen L. Carter wrote about the virtue in his 1996 book Integrity. It requires three steps, Carter said: •• Discerning what is right and what is wrong. •• Acting on what you’ve discerned, even at personal cost. •• Declaring openly that you are acting on your understanding of right from wrong. He elaborates: The first criterion captures the idea of integrity as requiring a degree of moral reflectiveness. The second brings in the ideal of an integral person as steadfast, which includes the sense of keeping commitments. The third reminds us that a person of integrity is unashamed of doing the right thing. Carter goes on: “In order to live with integrity, it is sometimes necessary to take that difficult step – to get involved – to fight openly for what one believes to be true and right and good, even when there is risk to oneself.”11

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DEVELOP MORAL REFLECTIVENESS Always approach your work with a strong sense of its moral ramifications. This includes recognizing that your stories are about real people. Your words and images can have positive or negative effects on people, and you must carefully weigh what those effects might be. But the moral ramifications go beyond stories. You should think deeply about what really matters about your work as a whole. Develop a sense of what you stand for as a journalist so that you can approach your craft with an attitude of public service, understanding that your responsibility to citizens comes before business interests, personal advancement or relationships with sources. Everything you do reflects on your colleagues and your news organization, which reinforces the notion that you are responsible for acting honorably.

KNOW WHERE YOUR VALUES LIE Some Denver Post staffers quit the paper even before the 2018 “rebellion.” Greg Moore, who was hired as editor in 2002, left in March 2016 because, he wrote, “I was done laying off journalists.” Chuck Plunkett’s predecessor as editorial page editor and the paper’s publisher also left in 2016. After Plunkett’s resignation, senior editors Larry Ryckman and Dana Coffield resigned. Dean Singleton, the former owner of the Post, resigned as chairman and stepped down from the editorial board, saying he disagreed with how Alden was managing the paper. “They’ve got the keys to the car and they can drive it any way they want to,” Singleton said. “But they’re not driving it in a way that I want to be a passenger of the car . . . They’ve killed a great paper.”12 By mid-summer, Ryckman, Coffield and other former Post reporters and editors had launched The Colorado Sun, a digital news site that received start-up funding from Civil, the blockchain-based platform that also funded Block Club Chicago. In a letter to readers, Ryckman said the Sun’s goal was not to save the jobs of journalists: “It’s about serving our great state and preserving the extensive institutional memory, journalistic muscle and passion for storytelling and accountability that we bring to every assignment.”13 Chuck Plunkett was hired by the University of Colorado Boulder to direct its capstone program for journalism undergraduate and graduate students. In October 2018, Colby College in Maine awarded him the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for courage in journalism. In an

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acceptance speech, he said that what happened at the Post was, for him, a “moral issue.” If you own a newsroom, you own a quasi-public institution vital to the maintenance of society. You own a piece of the American democratic experiment. You must invest in that newsroom for the public good. That’s the price of admission.14

CONCLUSION You have to know where your values lie, and you must be willing to act on them, no matter the personal cost. That’s what integrity is all about. You must decide what you stand for and what you stand against. Have the courage of your convictions to speak and act on what you believe is right. Don’t sell out. The best journalists learn that lesson in order to do their work in an honorable way. As you strive to be the best journalist you can be, you may win awards and recognition, and you may achieve a well-paying and influential job. Don’t let it go to your head. Integrity is really all you have, in life and in your work. If you lose it, you may never regain it. Protect it in everything you say and do.

 ASSIGNMENTS 1. One simple definition of integrity is doing the right thing when no one is watching. But each of us must decide for ourselves how we define and embody this important concept. a. What are the principles and practices that are most important to you, both as a journalist and as an individual? Is there anything you believe so deeply that to compromise would be impossible? Write down your unbendable principles and standards. b. Using your list, evaluate the personal and journalistic decisions you’ve made over the past week. Do your actions and your beliefs align? Are there discrepancies? What practices or attitudes might you need to adjust? 2. There are similarities and dissimilarities in what happened at the Denver Post and at the Daily Illini (as discussed in Chapter 13)

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when its editors chose to run the Danish cartoons satirizing Muhammad. Compare the two cases. (You may need to do more research into both to get a deeper understanding of both situations.) What lessons do you take away from each circumstance?

  OTHER RESOURCES Colby College in Maine established the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism in 1952 in honor of Lovejoy, an abolitionist newspaper editor in Illinois who was shot and killed in 1837 when a mob attacked and burned his newspaper building. John Quincy Adams called Lovejoy the “first American martyr to the freedom of the press and the freedom of the slave.” You can learn more about Lovejoy and the award at www.colby.edu/lovejoyaward. In addition to Chuck Plunkett, other journalists mentioned in this book have also received the Lovejoy award: Bob Woodward, Anne Hull, Jerry Mitchell, Studs Terkel, Maurice Possley, Tom and Pat Gish, Bill Kovach, David Halberstam, Eugene Patterson and Eugene Roberts. To get a sense of what these and other award-winning journalists have stood for, you can read many of their remarks at www.colby. edu/lovejoyaward/past-recipients.

NOTES 1 Denver Post Editorial Board, “Editorial: As Vultures Circle, The Denver Post Must Be Saved,” Denver Post, April 6, 2018. 2 Sydney Ember, “Denver Post Rebels Against Its Hedge-Fund Ownership,” The New York Times, April 7, 2018; Jack Healy, “Denver Post Editor Who Criticized Paper’s Ownership Resigns,” The New York Times, May 3, 2018; Brian Stelter, “Denver Post Editor Resigns in Protest: ‘I Was Being Boxed In’,” CNN, May 4, 2018. 3 Kristen Hare, “These Editors Left Their Newsrooms Instead of Laying Off More Journalists,” poynter.org, November 14, 2017. 4 Justin Simmons, “Sinclair Kept Meddling With Our Broadcasts. So I Quit,” The Washington Post, April 15, 2018; Laura Wagner, “How Local News Stations Are Rebelling Against Their Sinclair Overlords,” Deadspin. com, April 5, 2018; Anonymous, “We’re Journalists at a Sinclair News Station. We’re Pissed,” Vox.com, April 5, 2018. 5 Sunny Dhillon, “Journalism While Brown and When to Walk Away,” Medium.com, October 29, 2018. 6 Maurice Possley interview, January 24, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition.

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7 Howard Kurtz, “Chicago Editor Quits as Tribune Cuts Deeper,” The Washington Post, July 15, 2008. 8 “Prager Leaves Journal: ‘The Paper and I Were No Longer a Good Fit’,” Politico.com, April 3, 2009. 9 Gene Owens, “Goodbye to the Valley, Goodbye to Editorial Writing,” Roanoke Times & World-News, January 14, 1990. 10 Interviews with Candice Norwood, June 9, 2018; Janelle O’Dea, June 30, 2018; Maria Ines Zamudio, June 16, 2018; Megan Jones, July 16, 2018. 11 Stephen L. Carter, Integrity, Basic Books, 1996, p. 7. 12 Gregory Moore, “Who Will Step Up and Save the Denver Post?” Denver Post, April 6, 2018; Associated Press, “3 Top Figures at Denver Post, Including Former Owner, Quit,” May 5, 2018; Michael Roberts, “Dean Singleton on Resigning From the Post: ‘They’ve Killed a Great Newspaper’,” Westword, May 7, 2018. 13 Larry Ryckman, “A Welcome Letter From Our Editor,” The Colorado Sun, September 10, 2018. 14 Chuck Plunkett, “PUTTING THE VULTURES ON NOTICE: What if Elijah Parish Lovejoy Ran His Newspaper Merely to Get Rich?” www. colby.edu/lovejoyaward/chuck-plunketts-lovejoy-transcript.

16 Commit Journalism Twenty-one police officers and detectives crowded into Barry Bearak’s small room in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. Men with rifles guarded the door while others searched his room for clues that would prove him guilty of a crime. They found two passports. One with a visa showed he had entered the country as a tourist. The other contained papers that showed he was a reporter for The New York Times. “You’re actually a journalist?” police asked. “Yes,” Bearak replied. “And you’re not accredited in Zimbabwe?” “No,” Bearak said. Bearak and his wife Celia Dugger became co-bureau chiefs of the Times bureau in Johannesburg, South Africa, in early 2008. That March, Bearak went to neighboring Zimbabwe to cover the presidential election between incumbent Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsavangirai. Mugabe had ruled the country since its liberation from Great Britain in 1980; he was a dictator, corrupt and cruel. The initial election results indicated that Tsavangirai won, but the Mugabe regime refused to release official results. Zimbabwe had no free press, and Bearak and other journalists had to protect themselves and their sources. But as the election stalemate continued, reporters became less cautious, identifying themselves and their affiliations at news conferences and asking tough questions. Bearak filed several online updates daily, and dictated from his notes over a mobile phone as he worked in downtown Harare. On April 3, 2008, he went back to his lodge to file another story. Around four in the afternoon, he stepped out of his room for a break.

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A female detective yelled at him, and several men quickly surrounded him. “Who are you?” they wanted to know. “You’ve been gathering, processing and disseminating the news,” a detective hissed at him. And police had the evidence to prove it: Bearak’s notes were spread across his desk, text messages were readable on his cellphone, his stories were in a file on his laptop. The detective informed Bearak that he would be charged with “committing journalism.” The cops hauled him and another reporter to the Harare Central Police Station. There they were thrown into jail cells.1

No matter how small the place, people everywhere deserve “thoughtful, unafraid journalism,” Roanoke Times reporter Mary Bishop once told a college audience. “They don’t just deserve it,” she said. “They need it. A democracy requires it.”2 That’s always been the case, but it’s especially true today as good journalism faces so many existential challenges. Large and small newspapers around the country have closed, while others have slashed newsroom staffs and drastically reduced the number of pages devoted to news. Many are owned by investment partnerships that have no journalism experience or any sense of civic responsibility to local communities; their focus is almost entirely on how much money they can bring in. Network and local television news audiences have declined, and many local stations feel their journalism has been compromised by corporate edicts. Cable news ratings have increased, but the networks are ideologically polarized, dedicating more and more time to strident commentaries and arguments instead of straightforward, verifiable reporting. Many journalists have moved from traditional organizations to nonprofit digital operations that are committed to reinvigorated local and national newsgathering. Whether they can sustain themselves remains an open question. In addition, the public’s respect for journalism and journalists has continued to fall, with survey after survey showing pluralities or majorities of Americans believing that the news they read or see is biased and/or inaccurate. Politicians have accused reporters of bias; the president of the United States has repeatedly called them the “enemy of the people.” In some instances, journalists have become targets and victims of physical assault, cyber-bullying, and – in

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this country and abroad – deadly violence. At least 53 journalists were killed around the world in 2018, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists; 34 were actually singled out for murder. United States journalists were among the targets. In June, a gunman killed four journalists and a sales representative in the offices of the Annapolis, Maryland, Capital Gazette. In October, Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist who was an outspoken critic of the rulers of his native Saudi Arabia, was murdered in a Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey.3 And yet you have decided to be a journalist. Thank you. The field needs people who aren’t afraid of challenges and who understand why a democracy needs – requires – journalism. The journalism you produce over the next decades will be different in many, if not most, ways from the journalism of previous years. Newspapers and broadcast news will survive in some fashion, but much of your work will be produced and disseminated digitally, some of it in ways that don’t exist now. But even though the methods of producing, delivering and consuming news will change, you must remain committed to the fundamental values and practices that have sustained good journalism for generations. As a member of the next generation, you have a duty to provide the journalism that people deserve and need. A bottom-line mentality drives many of the companies that own and operate news organizations these days. Make no mistake: The bottom line has always been important. News organizations serve the commercial interests of their owners, and they need to be financially sound to remain viable. But journalism is not a commodity, like a box of tissues or a roll of paper towels: It’s a civic good. Many of the citizens who need it understand its importance, even if that understanding is implicit rather than explicit. Honest, unafraid journalism stirs and empowers people. That’s why tyrants and dictators outlaw it, and the corrupt try to undermine it. But it lives and breathes in the places where it is practiced fairly and honorably. People get passionate about journalism. Sometimes they agree with it, and other times they argue over it. It can make them laugh and make them cry. It can anger them and even outrage them. If you practice journalism well, you will reflect what’s going on in the world in a comprehensive but proportional way, and you’ll give citizens stories and information that will move them to act. If you do it half-heartedly or frivolously, citizens will let you know. The bonds of trust and credibility that you establish with your audience are fragile. If you break them, you may not be able to restore them.

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Journalism needs people who are committed to it as both a craft and a profession. This is not to discount the contributions of citizens who keep tabs on what goes on in their neighborhoods and communities. Citizens have always augmented the professionals. The more eyes and ears on government and schools, on police, court systems and other institutions of society, the better; their additional independent observations only increase the flow of information and news. But citizens have other occupations and interests, and they may not always sit through the governmental meeting, monitor the trial, hurry to the scene of the accident or walk through the blighted neighborhood to talk to landlords and their tenants. Communities will always need full-time professional journalists who will commit themselves to the hard digging, the questioning, the hellacious hours, the worry and the second-guessing that are required to consistently produce stories that matter. It needs people like you.

GETTING PERSONAL You may have wondered about the person who collected the stories for this book. I was a newspaperman for 32 years; for 29 years I was a reporter and editor at The Roanoke Times in Virginia; as you certainly know by this point, it was there that I learned a lot of the lessons this book seeks to impart. I worked with rookies who were still learning how to report and write basic news stories and with experienced reporters and editors who taught me far more than I ever taught them. We covered big stories and small ones, from killer floods and blizzards to major investigations of public officials and public policies. We were finalists for a Pulitzer Prize three years in a row. I then taught journalism at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign for a dozen years. I made that move before the major economic and technological disruptions hit newsrooms across the country, which spared me from the difficult job of making massive cuts and – worse – laying off journalists solely for financial reasons. I have the utmost respect for former colleagues and friends who went through those hard times. I can only hope that I would have acted with the grace and courage they displayed. Leaving the newsroom was difficult. After spending a third of a century doing the same thing – though working in a newsroom day in and day out is never the same thing – making such a major change

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was scary. As an editor, though, I also considered myself a teacher. I worked with reporters to help them do a better job of telling readers what they needed and wanted to know about the world around them. My goal in the classroom was similar: If I could give beginning reporters some guidance about how to do journalism properly – well, I thought that would be a good use of my time. When I left the newsroom, I told my colleagues that I believed journalism was a force for good in our society. I couldn’t teach journalism if I didn’t believe that. I still believe it. I also told my colleagues that, most of all, I believed in them, and trusted them to do the right thing by their readers, their co-workers and their community. Like all good journalists, they’ve done their best to fulfill that public trust, even as conditions got more difficult in their newsroom. Now, I put my faith in you as a young journalist at the start of your career. The news business will continue to change in ways that we may not be able to imagine. Whatever happens, though, you must remain true to the principles and practices that have sustained good journalism over the years. Build on the work of your predecessors and protect the profession against those who would debase, abuse and cheapen it. Never forget that the core purpose of journalism is to serve the public, to give citizens information they need to be free and selfgoverning. Keep the people in the forefront of all that you do. They depend on you to provide information to help them navigate the world and make sense of what’s going on. Do not look upon them as objects, customers, eyeballs, market shares or focus groups. Never lose sight of their humanity. Their stories are at the heart of what you do. Telling their stories is a privilege.

 TIPS FROM YOUNGER JOURNALISTS: STICK WITH IT Don’t be scared of all the gloom and doom you hear about the industry. This is not a career you go into to make a ton of money or get famous. But you get to do something different every day, and tell important or at least interesting stories. Dan Petrella, state government reporter, Chicago Tribune

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As tough as it is in this field, people who are willing to work hard and stick with it are still doing good work, important work. There have been a lot of self-inflicted wounds, but everyone I know who wants to be in journalism is still in journalism. The work is going to be the same. We need talented young people to do it. We’re going to solve the bigger challenges. Stick with it. Steve Contorno, political editor, Tampa Bay Times Right now I am watching so much excitement in the industry and so much innovation. It used to be competition over everything. Now with all these new start-ups, it’s collaboration over competition. We are dreaming up new ways to collaborate, to do more with the little we have. All for the greater good. We all want to change the world . . . Even though journalism has changed so much – digital, funding, etc. – the fundamentals of journalism and what people want out of journalism aren’t changing. The fundamentals are important. At the heart of it, it’s still the same skill set. The same things that made you want to be a reporter made me want to be a reporter. Stephanie Lulay, cofounder/managing editor, Block Club Chicago4

  ONE LAST CHECKLIST It’s impossible to put everything you need to know as a journalist in one text; you will be learning your entire career. But some key points that I hope you’ll keep in mind are: •• Be accountable to your public. They should know how you gather your information, who your sources are, what gaps still exist in your reporting. Be as transparent as possible. •• Be accountable to your colleagues. They count on you to do your job professionally and honorably. Your journalistic missteps will reflect poorly on them, just as theirs will reflect poorly on you. Lean on each other for advice, solace and feedback. Support them, and welcome their help when you’re the one who needs it. •• Be accountable to yourself. Protect your integrity and your credibility; if you lose them, you may never get them back. Resist pressures to compromise your core principles and values.

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•• Don’t worry about fame. Telling the truth may not make you popular. Be satisfied with doing your job well and occasionally hearing a word of thanks or praise from a reader or a viewer. That ultimately means more than any prize or award. •• Keep things in perspective. We are bombarded with news and information 24/7, often second to second; it seems non-stop because it is. But not everything demands immediate attention or comment. Take a deep breath and try to see things the way they really are. Your readers and viewers need you to help them put events in context and perspective, not to sensationalize or hype things. •• Embrace new technology, but don’t let it rule you. New tools are a means to an end, not the end itself. They may help you find sources and information, but they can’t replace the need to talk to people in person, hear what they say, and comprehend and explain their happiness, sadness, pain and anger. The world is complicated; it cannot be reduced to 280 characters or less. •• Use common sense on social media. Jeffrey Katz, news director at WAMU in Washington, D.C., has this advice for using social media: Don’t tweet something you can’t stand behind. Retweets aren’t necessarily endorsements, but if you always retweet from one point of view, that could signal a bias or point of view that compromises your independence. Remember that wherever you are, you represent the organization you work for. Don’t do anything on social media that will inhibit or compromise your ability to cover a story fairly.5 •• Aspire to do great things. Even if many of your stories are small or incremental, you can still reach for the heights with other stories. The most moving works of journalism help us to see possibilities of accomplishment and achievement. Look for stories that right wrongs, solve problems and correct injustices. Act as a watchdog on the powerful and influential, and give voice to those whom society ignores. •• Don’t wait for inspiration. Work hard instead. •• Be humble. You don’t have all the answers. You don’t even know all the questions. •• Remember that your stories are about real people. Be thoughtful about what you write. Seek the truth, and minimize harm when you can. Make sure that what you do serves a purpose. •• Remember there are no shortcuts. You learn by working hard and doing something, then doing it again, and again, correcting mistakes and getting better every time.

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•• Say thank you. Your mom taught you this. When someone helps you, thank him or her. It’s the right thing to do. •• Find a mentor; then become one. No matter how much you learn in school, you need mentors to help you figure out all the things that you still don’t know. Pay it forward when you have the chance. •• Be brave. Don’t be afraid to stand up for what you believe is right, even in the face of opposition. Be true to your convictions. •• Raise hell. Some things are outrageous. Don’t be afraid to take a stand against them. •• Have fun. Don’t lose sight of the joy that comes with doing good, meaningful journalism. There really is no better job in the world.

CONCLUSION Barry Bearak and British freelancer Stephen Bevan spent four nights in a dank cell before a magistrate dismissed the charges against them and they were released. “Committing journalism,” in fact, was no longer a crime on the books in Zimbabwe. The law had recently been changed, and it was illegal only to falsely claim to be accredited. It’s not a crime to commit journalism in this country either. But what if it were? Could you get arrested? Would you be convicted, or would the evidence against you be unconvincing to a jury of your peers? Make your part of the world a better place. Commit journalism.

 ASSIGNMENTS In Chapter 1 you created a list of the reasons why you wanted to become a journalist. Review your list, ask yourself these questions, and then discuss your answers with your classmates: 1. Are there items you would add or drop? What are they, and why? 2. Has your thinking about the craft and practice of journalism changed? How? 3. What are your hopes and aspirations for both yourself and other journalists? 4. What can you do to make a difference in the world around you?

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  OTHER RESOURCES Five people were killed in the 2018 attack on the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md.: Gerald Fischman, columnist and editorial page editor; assistant editor and columnist Rob Hiaasen; sports reporter John McNamara; sales assistant Rebecca Smith; and community beat reporter Wendi Winters. Two months after the murders, novelist Carl Hiaasen wrote a column about his brother, Rob, and what he stood for as a journalist: www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/ carl-hiaasen/article217996855.html. We’re at the end of a semester and not necessarily the end of your college career. But two commencement addresses are worth your time: Barry Bearak won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his stories about poverty and war in Afghanistan. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Bearak gave the 2003 commencement address at the university. There’s no video, but his thoughts about journalism and its responsibility in the world are still worth reading today: https://commencement.illinois. edu/assets/docs/Addresses/BarryBearakAddress.htm. David Carr’s 2015 Commencement Address at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism has been cited several times in this book. Watch it now, and be inspired: www.youtube. com/watch?v=7V3o5ZeSEwE.

NOTES 1 Bearak interview, February 13, 2009, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition; “In Zimbabwe Jail: A Reporter’s Ordeal,” The New York Times, April 27, 2008. 2 Bishop interview, August 31, 2008, from Living Journalism, 2011 edition; “Reporter’s Influence Will Live On,” Rich Martin, The Roanoke Times, March 31, 2002. 3 Committee to Protect Journalists, “More Journalists Killed on the Job as Reprisal Murders Nearly Double,” December 19, 2018. 4 Interviews with Dan Petrella, July 22, 2018; Steve Contorno, June 21, 2018; Stephanie Lulay, June 29, 2018. 5 Interview with Jeffrey Katz, July 16, 2018.

Index accuracy 25–37; checklist 34–35; developing trusted sources 29–30, 121; fact-checking 31–33, 36; getting stories first and accurately 25–28; in reporting in an emergency 122; of social media stories 28, 30, 35; taking errors seriously 28–29; tips from younger journalists 31; verifying facts against source materials 33–34; in writing about deceased 171 Achenbach, Joel 19, 23 Alden Global Capital 181–183, 189 alibis, checking 77 Allison, Jay 72 Alvis-Banks, Donna 174–175 American Society of News Editors, Code of Ethics 188 Amin, Reema 93, 107, 173–174 Auletta, Ken 70–71 Banaszynski, Jacqui 52–53 Baron, Marty 130, 135 Barry, Dan 18, 19, 23 Barstow, David 79, 150, 152 Bearak, Barry 95–96, 193–194, 200, 201 behavior of journalists see humanity, remember your Belleville News-Democrat 130, 140–142, 146–148, 150, 152 Bernstein, Carl 81, 92 Birmingham church bombing, 1963 77 Bishop, Mary 13–17, 21, 136, 194 Block Club Chicago 109–110, 189 breaking news: competition to be first with 27–28; getting the story right

25–27, 28, 74–76, 84; photography 98–99, 101; on social media 2–3 Breslin, Jimmy 92, 101 Buettner, Russ 79 Camp Fire, Paradise 118, 121, 125 Capa, Robert 89–90, 100 Capital Gazette 118, 195, 201 Carey, James 6, 145 Caro, Robert 92 Carr, David 91, 166, 201 Carter, Stephen L. 188 cartoons depicting Muhammad 156–157, 162–163, 164–165 Catholic Church sexual abuse investigation 130 challenges in journalism today 194–195 Charleston church shooting 117–118, 120, 175 Charleston Gazette-Mail 81, 130, 143 Charlottesville demonstrations 98–99 checking your work: scientific methods for 80–82; when you have finished your draft 33–34 Chernobyl disaster 1–2, 10 Chicago Tribune 184 children, missing 170–172 Cilella, Jessica 143 citation of sources 30, 78, 80 citizen journalism 2–3 City News Bureau, Chicago 41, 82–83, 85–86 Clark, Curtiss 116, 117, 175 close to your story, getting 89–102, 108–110; being out there 91–93; checklist 100; fresh perspectives on the world 94–96; good reporting

Index

90–91; keeping your eyes and ears open 96–98; photojournalism 89–90, 98–99 CNN 26, 74, 75, 135; Social Discovery team 3, 64–65 CNN, Social Discovery team 32–33 coal miners, story of trapped 74–76 Coates, Ta-Nehisi 23 Cobb, Ty 96 The Colorado Sun 189 Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism: Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma project 176, 179; report on “A Rape on Campus” story 39, 43–44 commitment to journalism 193–200; checklist 198–200; and committing journalism 193–194, 200; tips from younger journalists 197–198 community journalism 103–115; building a relationship with community 106–107; checklist 113–114; knowledge of wider world 110–112; local reporting 103–106; setting up new models of 108–110; three As of 106–107; winning awards 112–113 comprehensiveness, committing to 132–133 Congressional Medal of Honor Society (CMOHS) 77 Conill, Dr Alicia 66 Contorno, Steve 7, 28, 31, 42–43, 53, 93, 97, 198 conversational interviews 54–55 cows in India story 95–96 Craig, Susanne 79 credentials, checking 77 Cross, Al 106–107 crowdfunding 109 Cullen, Art 112–113 Cunningham, Rosa Lee 63 curiosity 13–24; approaches to stories 20; asking why and how 19–20; assessing your own 15–16; checklist 21–22; importance of 16–17;

203

nurturing 17–18; pursuing 18–19; urban renewal investigation 13–15 cynicism as opposed to skepticism 84–85 Daily Illini (DI) 156–157, 162, 164–165 Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma 176, 179 Dash, Leon 17, 41–42, 53, 62–63, 65, 68 data, working with 30, 80, 119 Davey, Monica 27, 83, 92 Davis, Tyler 7, 119 deaths of journalists 195 defamation suits 45 democracy, journalism and 6, 194, 195 Denver Post 181–183, 189–190 Dhillon, Sunny 183–184 disasters see unexpected events DNAinfo Chicago 108–109 documents and records: checking 79–80; citing 35; requests under FOIA 147–148 Dolnick, Sam 58 Dotson, Gary 130, 147, 148 Dowd, John 96 dress 59 drugs investigations 143 Duncan, Goldie Christine 135–136 Eisenhower, President Dwight 119–120 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism 128, 189–190, 191 emergencies see unexpected events empathy, learning 170–172, 177–178 Erdely, Sabrina Rubin 38–39, 43–44 ethics in journalism 156–167; asking yourself good questions 161–162; checklist 165–166; ethical and legal considerations 158–159, 164; First Amendment privileges and responsibilities 162–165; making ethical decisions 159–161; “mom rule” 166; personal and professional integrity 188; publishing cartoons depicting Muhammad 156–157, 162–163, 164–165; unethical behavior 158

204

Index

Eulenberg, Edward H. 82 eyewitnesses 77 Eyre, Eric 130, 143, 149, 152 fact-checking 31–33, 35, 36 “fake news” 29 Fallows, James 93 Farenthold, David 97–98 feedback 162 Ferrando, Ramiro 144 Feynman, Richard 81 First Amendment 144–145, 157, 163, 164, 165–166 Flint water crisis 133–135 Foley, James 138 follow-up questions 52, 54, 65 Foody, Katie 7, 31, 68, 93–94, 105 Frank, Laura 149–150 Freedom of Information requests 141, 147–148 freedom of the press 144–146, 156–157, 163–165; and doing right thing 164–165 Friedman, Thomas 84–85 future of journalism 195 Gaines, William C. 151 Gelb, Michael J. 23 Giffords, Gabrielle 26 Gilbert, Daniel 149 Gish, Tom and Pat 103–104, 112, 191 The Globe and Mail 183–184 going out to get stories 91–93, 108–110 Golden Rule 54, 170 Gorton, Acton 156–157, 162, 164–165 Gross, Terry 54, 60, 64, 66 Gup, Ted 111–112 Halberstam, David 59, 171, 191 Hannity, Sean 48, 49, 65 Hanson, Ralph 75–76 Harrington, Shannon 78–79, 136 Harty, Declan 7, 108 Hauff, Natalie Caula 70 Hawes, Jennifer Berry 69–70 health insurance investigations 143–144 Heisler, Todd 177

Hersh, Seymour 31–32, 53, 57, 84 Hiaasen, Carl 201 Hiaasen, Rob 201 Hicks, Shannon 116–117 Houston, Brant 3, 79–80, 145 Hull, Anne 68, 128–129, 191 humanity, remember your 168–180; checklist 178–179; learning empathy 170–172, 177–178; local and national media behavior 174–176, 176–178; Sutherland Springs killings 168–169, 176–177; tips from younger journalists 172–174 humility 71 Hundsdorfer, Beth 140–142, 146–147, 148–149 Hurricane Katrina 83–84, 87, 124, 118, 127–128 images and video, fact-checking viewer submitted 32–33 Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) 8, 36, 110 Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues 106, 112–113 institutions, investigating 129–130; citizen alarm bells 133–135; commit to comprehensiveness in 132–133 integrity, personal and professional 187–188, 190 interviews 48–61; approaching your subject 53–54; checklist 58–59; conversational 54–55; face-to-face vs. phone 91; handling difficult 55–57; last question 59; listening skills and 62–63; preparing for 52–53, 57; Putin interview with Wallace 48–50; substance over style 50–51; taking notes 58; talking to strangers 52; time restraints 57; Trump interview with Hannity 48, 49; Trump interview with Wallace 59, 65 investigative reporting see watchdog journalism Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) 152 Isay, David 72

Index

Jackson, Derrick Z. 133–135 Jaquiss, Nigel 16 jobs in journalism, decline in 8 Johnson, Haynes 91 Johnson, President Lyndon B. 92 Jones, Megan 119, 173, 187 journalistic: attention deficit disorder 95; objectivity 80–82 Katz, Jeffrey 199 Kelly, Ryan 98–99 Kleinfield, N.R. 131–132 Kostin, Igor 1–2, 10 Kovach, Bill 80–81, 145, 191 Krums, Janis 2 Kunkel, Thomas 95 legal and ethical considerations 158–159, 164 Lewis, Scott 145 Lippincott, Sara 32 listening skills 55, 62–73; checklist 71; developing good 63–66; distinction between hearing and 64; interview techniques and 62–63; sharpening your 66–67; stories emerging as a result of 68–70 Little, David 121 local news: decline in outlets for 8, 114–115, 194 see also community journalism local television stations 143–144, 183, 194 Lovejoy, Elijah Parish 191 Lulay, Stephanie 8, 43, 108–110, 198 Malheur Enterprise 113, 143 McAdams, Mindy 16 McGaughy, Lauren 177–178 McPhee, John 32 On the Media 36 meeting people, getting out and 91–93 Mele, Christopher 28 Miller, James 177 Miss Virginia Pageant 78–79 missing children 170–172 mistakes 38–48; acknowledging and correcting 39–41; apologizing and

205

taking responsibility for 43; checklist 45–46; learning from 41–43; moving forward after 43; “A Rape on Campus” story 38–39, 43–45; at The Washington Post and The New York Times 46–47 see also accuracy Mitchell, Jerry 77, 191 models of news organization, new 8, 108–110, 145, 189, 194 “mom rule” 166 moral reflectiveness 189 The Mountain Eagle 103–104, 112 murder: of journalists 195; of women in South Carolina 69–70 Murray, Donald 94 Nalder, Eric 56 Nash, Nathaniel 84–85 neighborhood reporting see community journalism network, tips on building your 67–68 new models of news organization 8, 108–110, 189, 195 The New York Times 44, 54; breaking news and accuracy 26, 27, 28; coverage of Flint water crisis 134, 135; cow story 95–96; investigation of Trump’s finances 79, 149, 150, 152; journalistic failure at 46–47; Trump’s lawyers story 96–97; Vietnam War articles 163–164 news desert 114–115 Newtown Bee 116–117, 125, 175 Nixon, Ron 16, 53 nonprofit news organizations 8, 109–110, 144, 145, 194 Noonan, Peggy 85 Norwood, Candice 67, 93, 186–187 NPR 27–28, 66, 153; Code of Ethics 40, 160, 188 objective methods of checking your work 80–82 O’Dea, Janelle 7, 31, 68, 119, 187 Onward State 25, 26, 41 “ordinary people,” shining a light on 126–139; checklist 137; commit to comprehensiveness in 132–133;

206

Index

Flint water crisis 133–135; focus on people not institutions 129–130; James Foley 138; living and dying in poverty 126–129, 136–137; slow pace of change 135–136; unnoticed and eccentric 131–132 Owens, Gene 184–185 Paradise Camp Fire 118, 121, 125 Pardue, Douglas 4, 69–70, 126–127, 171–172 passion for journalism 8–9 Paterno, Joe 25–26, 27, 41 Patterson, Gene 166, 191 Patz, Etan 170–171, 172 Pawlaczyk, George 140–142, 146–147, 148 Petrella, Dan 7, 31, 197 Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project 132–133 photojournalism 101; Igor Kostin 1–2, 10; Robert Capa 89–90; Ryan Kelly 98–99; Shannon Hicks 116–117 planning for unexpected events 119–122 Plunkett, Chuck 182–183, 189–190, 191 police, treatment of news reporters 83 Possley, Maurice 41, 143, 184, 191 Post and Courier 69–70, 120, 175 poverty, shining a light on 126–129, 136–137; slow pace of change 135–136 Poynter Institute, St. Petersburg, Florida 11 practices, essential 5–6 Prager, Joshua 184 Priest, Dana 68, 69 principle, matters of 181–192; at Denver Post 181–183, 189–190; moral reflectiveness 189; personal and professional integrity 187–188, 190; reflecting on your own principles 185–186; resignations on 182–185, 189–190; values and 189–190 prison investigation 146–147 Prochaska, Chuck 157, 162 Project for Excellence in Journalism 132–133

ProPublica 8, 40, 144, 153 public’s perception of journalism 29, 194–195 Pugh, Mitch 175 Putin, Vladimir 48–50 questions: asking yourself good 161–162; follow-up 54, 65; last 59; tough 51, 58; why and how 19–20 see also interviews Quindlen, Anna 171, 172 quotes, direct 33 rape and sexual abuse investigations 130, 140–142 “A Rape on Campus” story 38–39, 43–45 Rather, Dan 8 reading 53 records and documents: checking 79–80; citing 35; requests under FOIA 147–148 Reed, Katherine 179–180 Relotius, Claas 158 research: background reading 53; on Lyndon B. Johnson 92; for profiles of people 77 resignations on matters of principle 182–185, 189–190 right, getting it see accuracy; mistakes right thing, doing the see ethics in journalism The Roanoke Times 127, 136, 174–175, 184–185; Miss Virginia Pageant 78–79; urban renewal investigation 13–15, 21; Virginia Tech student shooting 174–175 Roberts, Gene 17, 191 Rolling Stone 38–39, 43–44, 45 Romero, Simon 177 Rosenstiel, Tom 80–81 Rosenthal, David 16, 52 rural journalism 106–107; awards 112–113 see also community journalism Russert, Tim 11

Index

Sandy Hook Elementary School 26–27, 27–28, 116–117, 125, 175 Sawatsky, John 50–51, 58 Scanlan, Chip 66 scientific methods of reporting 80–82 Sendak, Maurice 60 Sesno, Frank 65 sexual abuse investigations 130, 140–142 shining a light on “ordinary people” see “ordinary people,” shining a light on Shipler, David K. 127–128 Silva, Rick 122 Simmons, Justin 183 Sinclair Broadcast Group 183 Siner, Emily 20, 58, 67–68, 108, 173 skeptical, being 74–88; checking documents and records 79–80; checklist 86; fallibility of human sources 76–79; objective, scientific methods of checking your work 80–82; as opposed to being cynical 84–85; in reporting on chaotic situations 84; story of trapped coal miners 74–76; verifying every aspect of a story 82–84 Smith, Glenn 69, 70 social media: breaking news by ordinary citizens on 2–3; checking accuracy of stories on 28, 30, 35; monitoring 3; posting on 35, 199; Twitter 2, 25, 26, 27, 117, 199 Society of Professional Journalists, Code of Ethics 27, 160, 164, 188 sources: broadening your range of 131; checking 27, 76–79; citing 30, 78, 80; developing trusted 29–30, 121; online 53 South Carolina, women killed by men in 69–70 speed limit enforcement in Virginia 97 Steele, Bob 161, 167 Stepp, Carl Sessions 77–78, 87 Stewart, Potter 163, 164 Stone, I.F. 150, 151–152, 153 Storm Lake Times 112–113, 143 StoryCorps 72 strangers, talking to 52

207

Sullivan, Margaret 65, 135 Sulzberger, A.G. 55, 104–105 surveys of world knowledge 110–111 Sussman, Sammy 144 Sutherland Springs killings 168–169, 176–178 Swan, Jonathan 33, 39 Tate, Madeline Adams 126–127, 135–138 Terkel, Studs 54–55, 127 Texas church shooting 28, 168–169 Thevenot, Brian 83–84, 87 three As of community journalism 106–107 “Till Death Do Us Part” 69–70 tips from younger journalists 93–94; building your network 67–68; internship experience 107–108; making sure you are right 31; speaking up 186–187; starting out 6–7; sticking with journalism 197–198; training 118–119; treatment of people 172–174 traumatic experiences, handling interviews about 56–57 Trump, President Donald: coverage of presidential campaign 97–98; “fake news” 29; interview with Hannity 48, 49; interview with Wallace 59, 65; lawyers overheard in a public place 96–97; New York Times investigation 79, 149, 150, 152; “phony photo” 27; Washington Post investigation 97–98 Twitter 2, 25, 26, 27, 117, 199 unexpected events 116–125; checklist 123–124; covering horrific events and natural disasters 116–118; planning for 119–122; Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings 116–117, 125 urban renewal investigation 13–15, 21 U.S. Supreme Court 26, 163 values 4–5, 189–190 verifying your work 33–34, 82–84; scientific methods for 80–82

208

Index

victims of disasters and traumatic events, treatment of see humanity, remember your video and images, fact-checking viewer submitted 32–33 Vietnam War 163–164 Virginia Tech student shooting 174–175 Vogel, Kenneth P. 96–97 Voket, John 116–117 Wagoner, Becky 74–75 Wall Street Journal 28, 85, 184 Wallace, Chris: Putin interview 48–50; Trump interview 59, 65 Walter Reed Army Medical Center 68–69, 128 war photography 89–90, 101 Ward, Ken, Jr. 81, 106 The Washington Post 38–39, 63, 68, 81, 92; breaking news and accuracy 26, 27; coverage of Flint water crisis 135; journalistic failure at 46, 47; Trump investigation 97–98; Vietnam War articles 163–164 watchdog journalism 140–155; adopting an attitude of 146–148;

checklist 151–152; freedom of the press 144–146; good 142–143; managing your responsibilities 149–150; many forms of 143–144; rape and sexual abuse investigation 140–142 water crisis, Flint 133–135 Watergate scandal 81, 92 Weitzel, Pete 82 Wenner, Jann 44, 45 Wilson, Marie 7, 42, 43, 94, 143 Wolfe, Tom 19 women in South Carolina, murder of 69–70 Woodward, Bob 27, 81, 92, 93, 191 world knowledge, surveys of 110–111 Wright, Derek 163 Zaitz, Les 113 Zamudio, Maria Ines 31, 57, 68, 119, 173, 187 Zdanowicz, Christina 3, 32–33, 64–65, 124, 173 Zimbabwe, committing journalism in 193–194, 200 Zimbrakos, Paul 41