Tag Archives: journalism

5 tips for the journalist in limbo

There comes a time in (nearly) every journalist’s career when she (or he) has to take a break from the profession, for whatever reason. I’m in that position now, with graduate school. I admit that at times, without a paper or news site for which to edit, design or write, I have something of an existential breakdown. Am I still a journalist?! Is someone in a trench coat going to revoke my membership card? 

That kind of a break, whether it lasts months or years, or is permanent or temporary, can be difficult to take. Here are some ways for the journalist in limbo to stay sharp (or more accurately, they’re how this journalist in limbo stays sharp).

1. Keep writing. I write all the time — blog entries, academic essays, dissertation notes, tweets, neurotic emails to my mother. It doesn’t have to be publishable or even journalistic. Stay used to writing as much as you can. It keeps your voice, grammar and mechanics sharp. If you’re in school, academic research is good practice for looking up public records. I’m looking up Hungarian electoral data; what are Sarah Palin’s emails compared with that?

2. Keep reading. I read and skim a ton of content every day. The New York Times, Washington Post, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, Guardian, BBC, Poynter, Telegraph, Gawker, Mashable, Slate, Salon and Kansas City Star form my core go-to links, but there are probably dozens more that I visit tangentially. Not only do I stay connected with global, national and local news, but I also get a good dose of quality writing and reporting. Good writing comes from good reading.

3. Keep practicing skills. This could be any one thing, or several small things. For instance, I’m working through HTML and CSS exercises in a workbook, and sampling some free online courses through News University. The code work is a refresher of basic skills I learned in J school, and the online tutorials offer a more theoretical approach to ethics, business planning and management. News University also offers inexpensive online help with several critical applications like InDesign and Photoshop, if you’re interested in that.

4. Stay engaged with social media. I tweet all the time, on a variety of topics — politics, sports, cooking, travel, movies — and it helps me practice brevity in my writing (see #1), engage others in dialogue, learn about different sources of news and practice filtering information. I’m also active in Foursquare (I love leaving tips) and maintain a LinkedIn account. You don’t need a steady journalism job to build an audience.

5. Network, as an extension of #4. Talk to people and follow people in a wide range of professions, not just journalism. Think of everyone as a potential source. Follow accounts that regularly link to job postings, maintain a website for your professional use and keep all of your contact information up to date. I created and ordered my own business cards, which I designed myself from scratch. Use the time when you’re not beholden to a media company to cultivate your own brand and learn how to sell yourself.

I’d be jumping the gun if I told you that the above points were guaranteed recipes for success (I’m still in graduate school and don’t have a job yet), but they’ve definitely helped me to stay in the loop and feel connected to my chosen profession.

I’ve worked for a newspaper of some kind in a staff capacity almost non-stop since I was 15: four years on my high school paper, four years on the University Daily Kansan and consecutive summers at the Indianapolis Star, Columbus Dispatch and Kansas City Star. It’s taken me a while to accept that while it’s awesome to get paid to write and edit and have an official press pass, my writing and opinions aren’t necessarily less valid if I’m not employed at a newspaper. Do I eventually want a full-time job in journalism? Yes, I think I do. But that doesn’t mean I have to sit and twiddle my thumbs until I get one, and neither do you.

Women in the newsroom

Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy (also known as “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and its sequels) features a tough heroine with chutzpah to spare. She makes no apologies for who she is, she never backs down from intimidation, she’s a consummate professional to the very end  and she regularly beats men at their own game.

I’m talking about Erika Berger (you thought it was Lisbeth Salander, didn’t you?).

Berger, with journalist Mikael Blomkvist, helped build Millennium magazine into a gutsy shrine to investigative journalism. Her tenure saw the magazine expose sex trafficking, corporate malfeasance and all manner of government corruption. She left Millennium to take the editor-in-chief job at Sweden’s top newspaper, only to return to Millennium at the end of the series rather than compromise her principles.

I can’t help but think of Berger when I read about Jill Abramson, who last week gained the crown jewel of journalism: leadership of the New York Times. She’s the first woman to ever hold the job; you’ll keep seeing this sentence over and over if you look into it.

If you’re unfamiliar with Abramson, I recommend this succinct but informative profile from the Guardian. What you’ll find is an impressive journalist — a former Washington bureau chief and managing editor with a love of in-depth investigative reporting and eye for the digital age. Her past friction with authority — digging deeper into Ken Starr’s motives during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and butting heads with the Bush administration — makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Rock-solid credentials.

So why is it a big deal that she’s a woman?

While I know it’s an obvious milestone that can’t help but pop up, I’m leery that putting so much emphasis on Abramson’s sex might subtly be sending some hint of affirmative action or condescension. This is clearly not the case, but it’s troubling that in addition to explaining her background (which would be the case for any new editor, man or woman), Abramson seems compelled to defend her vision of the Times. In perhaps the same way that a female presidential candidate may once have had to prove that she wouldn’t push the Button during menopausal mood swings, Abramson has stated that “soft news” won’t overtake the Times’ front page.

Would a male executive editor have to iterate that?

While the Kansan is obviously not the Times, it is in its own way a microcosm of a broader journalistic culture. My second semester as managing editor, the entire upper echelon of management was female: the editor-in-chief and three managing editors. By May, after dealing with a bomb threat, stabbings, robberies, an alcohol-related death, an accidental death, a bizarre animal cruelty case, a fatal hit-and-run and numerous other crises, I’d have dared anyone to tell us we were “too soft.”

The Kansan (which lately has male and female editors in roughly equal measure) isn’t alone here. Of the 17 winners of the Associated Collegiate Press Newspaper Pacemaker in 2010, 11 papers had female editors or co-editors. Of the 11 large-school winners of the Associated Collegiate Press Online Pacemaker in 2010, six sites had female editors (including the awesome Lauren Cunningham, who managed Kansan.com that semester). So not only are women running college newspapers more often now, but we’re apparently running them very well.

We admire great male journalists simply as “great journalists.” Eventually — and here’s hoping Abramson’s tenure helps — I hope we can also look at great female journalists simply as “great journalists.” Both young men and women in the profession need role models and mentors. I’d like young women (and men) interested in our profession to admire seasoned ladies based on their qualifications and accomplishments, not because they got as far as they did despite the fact that (or because) they’re women. Focusing disproportionately on Abramson’s gender, and not on her record, doesn’t help.

I wish Abramson the best of luck, and I hope she knows that she has a whole fleet of young women journalists coming after her. Someone had to be first, after all. But not the final.

Commentators must have standards, too

I’ve always loved movies — I saw “The Little Mermaid” in the cinema when I was about 2 and a half, and the rest is history. In middle school and high school, I wrote reviews for my parents and other family members to read and occasionally for my high school newspaper. In my 8th grade gifted class, we had to interview a professional working in our area of interest. I contacted Bob Butler, the film critic at the Kansas City Star, and asked him about his work. He replied in great detail and showed good humor toward my teenage-minded questions, and to this day I remember that and appreciate the time he took replying to me.

Much of my journalism experience up to this point relates to opinion writing and commentary. I wrote a column for my high school paper, served as the opinion editor and wrote and assigned staff editorials as editor-in-chief. My first job at the University Daily Kansan involved writing book reviews for Jayplay. I spent my sophomore year as a long-distance columnist before manning the opinion desk for a semester and working on the editorial board for an additional two semesters after that.

The big misconception I see about opinion writing? It’s the idea that, because they’re presenting an “opinion,” a person can say or write whatever they want. Oh, no no no no. The top-quality columns and editorials will involve just as much reporting and research as any straight news story, and it’s these writers’ knowledge of what they’re discussing that makes their voices so critical.

Bearing that in mind, I was surprised to read yesterday on Deadline that Movieline had sacked Elvis Mitchell over an error in his review of the film “Source Code.” According to Nikki Finke’s Deadline article, the studio screened a final cut of “Code” for Mitchell to review. Yet in his review, Mitchell took issue with Jeffrey Wright smoking a pipe in the film — an act that director Duncan Jones said on Twitter had been included in a draft of the script but was cut for the actual film. Yet it ended up in Mitchell’s review. Finke wrote that Movieline formally asked Mitchell to explain himself, and eventually terminated his contract entirely, after he’d worked there a scant three months.

If you’re unfamiliar with Mitchell, just know that he’s no small-timer; before joining Movieline, he worked as a critic for the New York Times, appeared on television and is a fixture on the festivals circuit. For a seasoned critic like him to make that kind of a mistake is almost … scandalous.

The reader comments accompanying the Deadline article are all over the map. Some speculate that he left the film early, or didn’t see it at all, and based his review on a copy of the script he had. Others suggest that he read the script and saw the film, and just got confused. Still others defend him and suggest that we don’t know the whole story. Whether they support him, many commenters suggest that he might be given a pass were it not for other erratic behavior, such as backing out of working on Roger Ebert’s review show and a development program with Columbia Pictures, both missteps that Finke discusses in her article.

Ultimately the only person who knows exactly how or why the discrepancy occurred is Mitchell. Not being in the theater with him, it’s not my place to say that he saw the film or not, because obviously I can’t know. But this episode, which brought down a highly respected film critic, should be a cautionary tale for opinion writers, a lesson telling them to take care and make sure they get their facts right. Film critics — including Roger Ebert — make mistakes all the time when it comes to characters’ names and relationships and even some basic plot points. What probably cost Mitchell was that his error was made not when describing the film, but when judging it. A troublesome mistake, clearly, but one that all aspiring opinion writers should be wary of.

This is news?

Full disclosure: For a long time, probably a good 5-6 years, CNN was “my” news station. I had always thought of its journalists as being fairly on-the-ball and objective (or at least, my version of objective, which may or may not be someone else’s). It was also the only news channel I could get in my dorm room, so it was convenient.

I haven’t regularly watched it in quite some time, mostly because I’ve been out of the country. At the time I last watched it, though, I had noticed a marked — and, to my mind, fairly rapid — descent into inanity.

Call me a snob, but I never did like the whole iReporter thing. Some people really appreciate “citizen journalism” and think it has value. To my mind, members of the general public, especially those on the scene of major events, can and should make great sources, and time and again their photos and video make compelling supplementary material. But that’s what it should be, in my opinion — supplementary. It should not replace the work of journalists — people not only trained in writing, editing and news-gathering, but also in ethics, judgment and legal theory. Likewise, Twitter trends can be a good starting point for news items, but they should not be the news item. Not only because Twitter can suffer from herd mentality, but also because a lot of what’s on it just isn’t true (according to Twitter, Johnny Depp died, like, four times last year).

So this trend toward relying on people-on-the-street for news items had already somewhat turned me off. Imagine my horror when I got on Gawker earlier today and saw this. Jon Stewart, bless him, ripped CNN a new one over some of its segments. They range from corny (Stream Team, which … I don’t even know) to borderline offensive (You Choose the News). The example of the latter segment involved an anchor (read: glorified infotainment card-reader) giving the audience three possible story topics. People would text to pick which one they wanted to know more about.

This concept might be cute or funny if it was for animal stories or some other fluff. But the topics to choose from were: the Afghan government’s takeover of women’s shelters, homeless female Iraq/Afghanistan veterans and the arms trade in Abu Dhabi, which has implications for Africa and the Middle East. As Stewart said, “Those all seem kind of important.” Someone in the comments helpfully pointed out that in the time CNN spent shilling (I almost wrote “whoring”) the segment, they could have covered all three stories in a fair amount of detail.

Granted, it’s not just CNN. It’s an easy target because Stewart did such a good job ridiculing it. After spending almost five months living in the UK, I think maybe I’ve just been spoiled by the BBC. The BBC has its share of cute stuff, but more often than not it covers the world hard-core. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, even Wisconsin: The stories are there. Analyses of fashion, technology, film and music sit next to market reports, biographies of world leaders and multimedia coverage. Reader input is requested and used, but it sits alongside the coverage, giving it depth and perspective.

I wondered, how could the BBC (and even other sources like Al Jazeera English) get things so right and CNN and its ilk get things so … tone-deaf? I believe the answer is that the BBC is considered a public good. Its budget comes from license fees paid in by anyone with a TV set or access to live broadcasts. It is beholden to the British public (and Her Majesty, by Royal Charter), not to any corporate behemoth. Granted it has its own problems — people still accuse it of some bias and some of its anchors’ salaries are under fire — but I don’t think it would ever treat serious news like some sort of raffle prize. Despite accusations of bias (which you’ll find anywhere), it strives to be as non-partisan as possible given its structure and funding. And it’s everywhere.

On the other end is CNN (and Fox and MSNBC and to a somewhat lesser extent the networks), taken to corporate news’ inevitable conclusion: the watering down of issues and news turned into entertainment and entertainment trying to pass itself off as news.

Stewart, Colbert, truthiness and journalists

One of my (few) regrets since moving to England is that I won’t be in the U.S. or anywhere near Washington DC when Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert stage their dueling rallies, the Rally to Restore Sanity and the March to Keep Fear Alive.

Imagine my surprise when I read that NPR was banning its news employees from attending the rally. The New York Times and Washington Post, while allowing their employees to attend, have also given them strict guidelines on how to behave. Don’t wear supportive shirts, don’t give any impression of support, try hard not to laugh (no, really). The Times’ directive in particular makes use of the Royal We (it might as well be) and has the distinct flavor of an Old Testament God hurling down orders from on high. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s Colbert Nation wristband.”

Washington City Paper hilariously lampooned such guidelines in its own tongue-in-cheek staff memo regarding the rallies. My personal favorite guideline is #10: “Feel free to laugh heartily at any jokes that target the terrorists.”

And there, I think, is the rub. It’s OK to laugh at terrorist-targeted jokes because it’s easy and requires little in the way of political or journalistic courage. It comes down to news agencies’ skittishness about their credibility and a mad dash to snuff out anything that might remotely resemble a conflict of interest. Despite Stewart and Colbert frequently mocking both sides of the political spectrum, it’s clear which side has organizations nervous.

Media ethicist and Miami Herald columnist Edward Wasserman summed it up perfectly in his Oct. 25 column. He notes that hand-wringing over whether employees attend a DC celebration of satire (is The Onion next on the chopping block?) dilutes very real conflict-of-interest dilemmas. Conflicts of interest are taken extremely seriously, and at their core, they undermine a reporter’s ability to fairly and objectively report a story. A true conflict of interest, Wasserman notes, is something like “the business reporter who covers a company in which she owns shares.” It is not employees attending a comedic event off the clock.

He goes further and says that it’s actually against news judgment principles — seeking tenets of prominence, conflict, proximity, unusualness, timeliness and impact — not to allow reporters to attend the rallies. Telling a reporter not to attend a well-publicized, controversial, first- and possibly only-time, celebrity-attended, interesting event on their own time is akin to telling an off-duty firefighter to stay away from any burning buildings he sees.

It comes down to courage versus cowardliness. Are news organizations secure enough in their own integrity to allow their employees to attend the Colbert and Stewart rallies off the clock, or are they so afraid of the conflict-of-interest shadow that they think that not allowing their employees to attend will make any difference at all to the people most likely to scream “BIAS”? People out to undermine news organizations will always find something to nitpick. If it wasn’t this event it’d be something else.

Most ominously, Wasserman says, is the question of how news organizations will handle stories and events that actually have legitimate ethical and moral implications when they can’t or won’t face a satirical event head on.