All posts in category Journalism ethics

Facts, folly and my newspaper swan song

It was a fitting end, my newspaper swan song. A challenging story, my Sunday article was an update of the toughest story I ever wrote — featuring two “Pregnant and Proud” teenagers in 1993, back when Roanoke had the highest teen-pregnancy rate in the state.

The public reaction had been harsh.

Shannon Huff, seated second from left, surrounded by her children and grandchild.

The outcry went national. It was very definitely personal, with more letters to the editor pouring in to decry the story — and the reporter who wrote it — than just about any other piece in our newspaper’s history.

The emotional toll it took on me was mighty — sleepless nights, fears that I’d sunk the reputations of two minors in a way that would forever set their lives on a downward spiral. I was 29 and pregnant with my first child, in the middle of a high-risk pregnancy. I was learning to give myself insulin shots at the same time readers were publicly calling me everything from racist to naïve.

That story — badly packaged and shallowly reported, true though it was — was not my finest moment in journalism, though it not only won awards; it also taught me many of my finest journalistic lessons:

That words matter.

That you can’t predict or influence the reaction people will have to a set of facts in a story.

That you can only do your best to present those facts humanely and fairly, digging as deeply as you can.

That, when in doubt, the medical code of ethics is always a good fallback: Do no harm.

I began trying to revisit “Pregnant and Proud” in 2011. The update seemed every bit as fraught as the first, filled with reluctant family members, depressing statistics, and rap sheets full of raw truths and damning decisions.

The main subject, Shannon Huff, wasn’t sure at first she wanted another story written. By the time she was on board and the complex set of facts of her life came into focus, I wasn’t sure there was a story to tell myself — at least not one that did no harm.

But not many journalists get to revisit a story some 21 years after the fact. Fewer still get to report from the same place for the same news outlet for 25 years.

When people ask what my favorite part of being a reporter is, I try to describe the way it feels driving to an interview. Sometimes I’m nervous. Usually I’m hopeful. Always I’m running through the possibilities, prepping for the wrinkles that might emerge.

Sometimes moments of grace occur, such as when I told Shannon I’d never set out to harm her and apologized near the end of our first sit-down interview earlier this year. She stood to hug me, tears streaming down her face. She’d “been through hell in gasoline drawers,” as she put it, and her experience as a proud, pregnant teen — including the newspaper feature — had become her unlikely lodestar. She wanted badly now to prove her critics wrong.

The U.S. poet laureaute Natasha Trethewey once told an interviewer that writers have a responsibility to grapple openly and honestly with difficult subjects. “When the Birmingham church bombing convictions came down, people on the radio were saying why open these old wounds? The problem with that thinking is assuming those wounds had healed. Some bones broken will forever be weak. … The best we can hope for is acknowledgment.”

Acknowledgment. That word was on the spelling test I took as an applicant for a feature writing job at The Roanoke Times in 1989. So was the word accommodate (some things you just never forget!).

The best journalists worry less about accommodating official viewpoints and more about acknowledging the little people caught in the web of tough circumstances, whether they’re showing up for court or for medical treatment, or standing in line at the VEC.

As the great reporter Susan Spencer-Wendel, who died last week of ALS at age 47, put it: “It was a privilege to go to work each day and grow democracy, to ferret out stories no one wanted told, to be trusted to inform and, yes, entertain our readers. When someone would ask me: ‘Who sent you?’ I loved to reply, ‘Well, ma’am, that would be Thomas Jefferson.’ ”

Nothing but the truth: It’s worth remembering the journalistic oath we made when we signed on for all the bad hours, low pay and sleepless nights, infused with the privilege of witnessing heartache and joy and, yes, judgment.

On the eve of the publication of my first book, “Factory Man,” I recently quit newspapering in favor of the deeper dive of researching and writing books. I’ll seek out my usual underdog subjects, working through the issues I now know I was born to tackle.

I’ll mine for the facts, which will do what they always do: morph into falsehoods the more I learn and the deeper I go.

Shannon Huff, 16 years old in 1993, from the original newspaper article. Public radio reporter Beverly Amsler interviewed me about this story for a featured that aired here.

4 Comments

by bethmacy on June 9, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Family, Journalism, Journalism ethics, Narrative writing, poverty, Racial inequality, Roanoke, teenagers, The Roanoke Times, traum journalism

Posted by bethmacy on June 9, 2014

https://intrepidpapergirl.com/2014/06/09/facts-folly-and-my-newspaper-swan-song/

What Would Robert Caro Do? (I finally got to ask.)

From the back cover of a reporter’s notebook, where I tape reminders on story structure, Caro-style digging and other inspirations.

Twenty-six people were featured in the iconic Air Force One photo of Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in as President of the United States. Standing next to him was Jacqueline Kennedy, just 43 minutes after her husband was pronounced dead.

The prize-winning journalist Robert Caro, who’s spent four decades chronicling the 36th president in a series of acclaimed biographies, had examined the records and talked to most all of the 26 people on board the plane that day, many of them multiple times. Then it hit him: After thousands of interviews about Lyndon Johnson, after decades of archives-combing, he’d never thought to interview the photographer who’d taken the picture.

So Caro found himself calling the Florida home of 89-year-old retired White House photographer Cecil Stoughton, praying he wasn’t actually calling Stoughton’s widow.

“My name is Robert Caro, and I’m writing books on Lyndon Johnson,” he told Stoughton’s wife, nearly 50 years after the photograph was made.

“Oh, Mr. Caro, Cecil has been waiting for your call.”

Caro, the two-time Pulitzer winner, brought down the house with that bit of meta-journalism during a recent panel on book-writing organized by the Lukas Prize Project, a joint project of the Columbia School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. I was in the catbird’s seat, sitting on the dais between Caro, who’d just won the Mark Lynton History prize for “The Passage of Power,” the fourth of his five planned LBJ books; and Andrew Solomon, who’d won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for “Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity.” Still a month from turning in my own work of narrative nonfiction, I was there for “Factory Man,” which had won the J. Anthony Lukas Book-in-Progress Award.

What would Robert Caro do? I had asked myself that question numerous times during the writing of my book about globalization and a struggling Virginia furniture-maker named John Bassett III, who’d taken on China and a tidal wave of corporate greed to save hundreds of jobs.

Now I had a chance to ask Caro that in person. The question had already sent me on a quest to interview an 86-year-old ambulance driver about an EMT call he’d made 30 years before. (Caro’s editor, who was seated in the audience, told me she roared at hearing that story.) It had sent me kayaking — white-water rafting, actually — down Virginia’s Smith River, which is 42 degrees year-round if you want to know. (Oh, I know that intimately, after plunging in head over tree branch.) It had sent me back to some of the same subjects over and over again, resulting in new material every time and my own new insights on prompting memories and, maybe more importantly, a subject’s genuine trust.

At the start of my project, I had taped a quote from Caro on the outside of my notebook: “There is no one truth, but there are an awful lot of objective facts, and the more facts you manage to obtain, the closer you will come to whatever truth there is,” he told a Time magazine interviewer last year.

I had 11 months to complete my manuscript, not a decade, which is what it took Caro to turn in his fourth, 700-page installment. His pace is so methodical and slow, The New York Times’ Charles McGrath has pointed out, that it’s taken Caro longer to write about LBJ’s years in power than LBJ spent actually living them. Among the things I learned during the hourlong panel:

Caro makes detailed outlines, which he types on an old Smith Corona Electra 210 then pins to the walls of his Columbus Circle office, near New York’s Upper West Side. The very first thing he does is write a two-sentence to two-paragraph summary of each book — all the better to authoritatively digress from your theme if you know intimately what your theme is.

He does better when he has a last line in mind, something he can aim toward. The moment Caro heard the subject of his first biography, Robert Moses, tell an audience that people weren’t sufficiently grateful for his work, it occurred to Caro exactly how he would end his seven years of research into the life of the urban planner who built and bulldozed much of New York — with the line: “Why weren’t they grateful?”

Similar to Caro’s tracking down the 27^th set of eyes aboard Air Force One, Andrew Solomon spoke about the process of trying to court the parents of Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold for his book about children who are markedly different from their parents, including kids who are cognitively, physically and psychologically impaired. Solomon’s book is full of bitter truths and surprises but always from the perspective of a journalist who is proud to bear witness to the “shimmering humanity” of parenting.

Respectfully but persistently, Solomon kept asking for interviews, even when the original response had been no. He corresponded with Sue Klebold for two years before she agreed to meet him for coffee — only to cancel at the last minute, saying she and her husband had changed their minds. Solomon told her he’d already purchased the nonrefundable ticket from New York to Colorado for their meeting — whether that was true or not, he didn’t say (I got the sense it wasn’t). But the Klebolds finally relented out of guilt, and ended up talking to him for seven hours during their first meeting alone.

They were thrilled that, finally, someone was more interested in understanding them — including the things they loved about their son — rather than judging them.

Solomon allowed himself to be moved, letting the emotions of his characters drive the theme of his book and the contextual reporting, not the other way around. His structure developed around the idea of what it’s like to parent profoundly different children, but he let his characters shape the final form as he winnowed 25 potential stories/interviewees down to ten over the course of 11 years.

“I tried to be awake to the possibility that the stories I was hearing were going to maybe change from what I thought I was writing,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to find the stick figures to back up points I’d already thought up. But I hoped that by talking to large numbers of people and [using] a more inductive process, I could get to the point of having my idea take shape around the people.”

In fact, he didn’t fully delve into the intellectual armature of the book until he was five years into story gathering mode. “I always thought if you ended up writing the book your proposed, it probably wasn’t worth investigating,” he said.

Friends asked me later what it was like meeting Caro, one of my heroes. He’s friendly and at the same time distant, putting his hand on your arm when he talks to you but volunteering — in a way that beats you to the punch — that, alas no, he does not blurb other writers’ books. (Fair enough, I thought, given that he’s in his late 70s and still has that fifth LBJ book to write.)

From left: Moderator Nicholas Lemann, Robert Caro, Beth Macy and Andrew Solomon

When I had a minute alone with him at the end of the evening, I asked how he might handle a sticky ethical issue I’ve been wrestling with for several months. “I don’t know, but I sure am looking forward to seeing what you do with that!” he said, beaming his bright-white smile and shaking my hand one final time.

Then he was off to hail a taxi with his faithful research assistant and wife, Ina. He had made a point to share the glory, asking her to stand up as he accepted his award, noting that she did not complain when they had to sell their house to help finance an earlier book. Throughout his career, Ina Caro was the only one he trusted enough to help him with research.

My friends and I headed to a bar while they waited for their cab. And I thought of another bit of advice I’d taped to my notebook at the start of the project, sent by my storytelling mentor Mary Bishop, in the form of a poem by David Whyte. While it’s good to take inspiration from the masters, the real magic happens when you find your own way into a project and develop your own Caro-like work ethic, starting with the genuine sound of your own voice and “the ground you know, the pale ground beneath your feet.”

The last stanza of David Whyte’s “Start Close In”

The Book Slog Blues (Part II)

Furniture departments were segregated in Southern factories until the 1970s. This is Stanley Furniture’s rub room in the late ’20s or early ’30s. Photo courtesy of Coy Young.

The more I learn for my book-in-progress, the more I am humbled by how stupid I was when I wrote my proposal for “Factory Man.” I actually told my editor at Little, Brown & Company that I was halfway through my reporting, when in fact that figure was probably closer to 5 percent.

I wasn’t lying when I said it. I had just forgotten the central tenet of good writing: It’s all about great reporting. The more you learn, the more you realize you didn’t know anything before.

What do I wish I’d known before I started writing my book five months ago, after 20-some years of pining to land a book contract?

The connection-making mind needs frequent breaks. It needs mid-afternoon walks up Mill Mountain and breaks to make chili verde, and it craves any help and inspiration it can unearth along the way.

So I tape things to my computer, and atop the notebooks I carry with me on interviews. I write down nice things my book writer pals say to me, such as these aptly incongruent affirmations from Roland Lazenby: “You’re fucking fearless” and “Don’t be scared.”

I read and reread things like this partial paragraph from a profile of hip-hop pioneer Ahmir Khalib (Questlove) Thompson, written by New Yorker writer Burkhard Bilger:

. . . He had an unending appetite for pop culture, a prodigious memory for dates, and a compulsion for cross-referencing them. He can tell you, for instance, that Philadelphia police bombed the MOVE headquarters on May 13, 1985; that Tony Orlando guest-starred on “Cosby” that month, and that “Soul Train” was a rerun that week.

Stand back and look at the contextual heavy-lifting accomplished in just two sentences. Marvel at the astonished, easy tone. Count the status-defining details — where the subject lived, what he watched, who he listened to and what it meant to live inside his brain in the spring of 1985.

John Updike once said we like characters like Becky Sharp and Mr. Quilp because “what we like is life — and if the character is alive, we don’t apply any other criteria.” That’s another inspiration I’ve clipped, with thanks to Martin Amis, who recalled it in an interview with Vanity Fair writer John Heilpern.

The deeper you dig into a subject’s history, the tougher the material-culling will be. I’ve never spent this much reporting time focusing on one industry through one person and, the truth is, we might both be suffering from interview fatigue.

In a one- or two-shot interview, you save the tough questions for the end. But what do you do when the interviews are spread over more than a year? You spread the tough stuff out and hope for the best.

I’m not writing a hagiography, I remind my main character. I’m not writing a biography. So let’s put an end to the embedding jokes about Paula Broadwell and General Petraeus right now!

I’m writing a book about globalization in which he is a heroic main subject but he’s not a saint because, let’s face it, he’s colorful, he’s clever, and he seems to genuinely care about the plight of his factory workers. But he ain’t a saint.

When I worry that maybe I’m stirring up stuff that should remain hidden in history’s dusty archives, I turn to the new U.S. poet laureate, Natasha Trethewey, who said this in a recent interview:

It is better if we grapple with [history]. Openly and honestly. And include parts that are difficult. … When the Birmingham church bombing convictions came down, people on the radio were saying, why open old wounds? The problem with that thinking is assuming those wounds had healed. Some bones broken will forever be weak. They will ache and cause pain. The best we can hope for is acknowledgment. What drives me crazy is when people don’t want to acknowledge!

I try to keep central in my mind: I may be writing about wealthy CEOs, but I’m also writing about their impact on tens of thousands of displaced factory workers whose stories are too rarely told.

“Factory Man” contains both history and current events, encompassing a decade of double-digit unemployment in Martinsville, Va., the recent sweatshop fires in Bangladesh and Pakistan, and what life was like for a bunch of hardscrabble sawmillers in 1902. The subject is as deep as it is wide and meandering, and that’s what keeps me awake so many nights because I know that finding exactly the right narrative, and the right tone to tell it in, are crucial.

So I write and, like the old sawmillers-turned-furniture men, I try to cull the good wood from the bad. I talk to people on the phone and I visit people, and then I talk to them again on the phone. I’ve driven from nursing homes to trailers to communities so exclusive that they purposely don’t show up on GPS.

I read through court transcripts, annual reports and simplistic old newspaper clippings.

I love, love, love the librarians and the curators, especially Pat Ross at the Bassett Historical Center, and Bill Bishop, the genius at the International Trade Commission who returns my late-night emails — by 6:45 a.m. And people like Bassett barber Coy Young, who just happened to have a stack of archival photos from Stanley Furniture during the Depression.

I really love, love, love my across-the-street neighbors Scott and Jean, who just yesterday brought me a mixed CD and homemade chicken soup to cure my strep.

My husband, Tom, is so patient with all my non-cooking and non-hygiene, he’s the real saint of my book. My son Will comes into my office at the end of his school day and still, at age 14, beams, “Hey mom, how was your day?”

Same as it ever was. I practice Ass In Chair and, for several hours a day, I try as I type to weave story from facts. I rarely take showers or leave the house, except to walk the dog up the mountain. I haven’t seen my hairdresser in six months and it shows.

I worry because I know what Robert Caro says is true:

There is no one truth, but there are an awful lot of objective facts, and the more facts you manage to obtain, the closer you will come to whatever truth there is.

I was lucky to stumble into coffee not long ago with Internet journalism guru Clay Shirky, whose parents live in Roanoke and who very kindly offered to read my draft and give feedback. Just as I’m lucky to call on writers like Roland, Annie Jacobsen, Bret Witter and Andrea Pitzer, who advised me to “start recruiting readers now!” — among many other useful things.

Such has been the ongoing lesson I’ve learned from this project, this career, this life: The more exceptional the individual, the more generous they tend to be in sharing what they know.

It had been awhile since Shirky’s heralded book, “Here Comes Everybody,” was published by Penguin, and initially Clay said he had no advice to offer. Then he remembered a tip, a nuts-and-bolts editing suggestion that is applicable to both writing and life.

When the publisher’s copy editor sends his or her edits, simply click “ACCEPT ALL.” It saves time in the long run, and if you stumble on a change you don’t like as you’re reading, you still have time to make that sentence sing.

I’m not sure my ego will let me ACCEPT ALL blindly without previewing the changes first, but if it gets my butt out of this chair a moment sooner, it could be just the thing.

What do Elvis, Louis Philippe dressers and Dalian, China have in common? They’re all featured in this maze of scribbles that is my whiteboard outline for chapter 17.

6 Comments

by bethmacy on December 13, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Books, China, Digital journalism, Journalism, Journalism ethics, Mill Mountain, Narrative writing, Racial inequality, Uncategorized, work-life balance

Tagged Journalism

Posted by bethmacy on December 13, 2012

https://intrepidpapergirl.com/2012/12/13/the-book-slog-blues-part-ii/

Journalism Ethics: Mystery desserts, midnight karma and the best story I never wrote

Historical clippings, pictures and interview notes for the juiciest story I never wrote.

I’m not an ethics expert, I confessed to the room full of students and faculty members attending Engaging Ethics, a Hollins University conference held earlier this week. I tend to do my best reporting when I go with my gut. What else do you fall back on when you’re alone with a subject and have to make split-second decisions about how to handle sticky material, or ask a painful question or negotiate whether you’ll write the story at all?

It was obvious from the questions lobbed at me and veteran television anchor reporter Keith Humphry that people in our audience believed that ethical standards have dimmed in this age of 24/7 media.

This may sound corny, but most professional journalists I know believe we’re trying to serve the greater good, whether that means helping a community heal from a tragedy like the Virginia Tech shootings or helping readers understand the signs of PTSD in returning veterans. I touched briefly on three scenarios I regularly face in the field and on the fly before presenting a case study from 2002.

• First lesson: How you treat people matters.

I seriously considered quitting my job the day after the Virginia Tech shootings. That’s how much I didn’t want to call grieving families on the phone. When more than 500 reporters from across the globe converged on Blacksburg, I wanted to flee screaming from the scene. Grieving people were sick of us, and some of my reporting brethren made me sick, too. One guy faked a broken arm so he could interview the wounded at the hospital.

But I was proud of how The Roanoke Times handled the coverage, realizing that the big media would leave and we’d still be here. We may not have gotten every story first, but we didn’t camp out in grieving family’s yards or photograph them sneaking into funeral home offices. In the long run, we ended up with deeper stories built on the most important element in journalism: trust.

• Lesson two: Objectivity is a worthy goal. But there are times when you can’t NOT get involved.

Picture a hospital in northern Haiti decimated with cholera. Pre-election riots are about to break out, trapping the medical team you’re covering inside a hospital compound. The doctors are hemmed in by the very people they’ve been sent to help.

Messages are lost in translation with no interpreters available. You’re surrounded by dying people, tired hospital staffers and grieving family members — including a mother who’d left her dead husband by the roadside so she could save her mother and child.

What do you do when a man asks you for money to help bury his son? How about when a doctor you’re writing about who hasn’t slept in two days asks you to fetch supplies from the office, or mix up baby formula, or how to say “please return in eight days” in Creole?

You do the right thing. Be a person first.

• Lesson three: Give a guy a break but (gently) persevere. Not long ago an editor and I debated the merits of sharing a prepublication story with a veteran suffering from serious PTSD. Ken, a 52-year-old former Guardsman now on full disability, had backed out of a profile I was working on about him early in the spring. His hands trembled during our first two-hour interview, and his wife told me later that recounting his story to me had left him an emotional wreck. Anticipating this, I’d researched how to interview with people with PTSD ahead of time, but none of my strategizing seemed to help. War was hell, and so was coming home and spilling it out to a newspaper reporter, no matter how empathetic she seemed.

But I kept in touch with Ken over the next several months. By May he was training dogs as part of his therapy. By September I detected the first whisper of optimism in his voice as he recounted a fishing trip to Florida. Seven months after our initial meeting, I asked if he’d reconsider letting use a part of his story, as well as some wonderful photos our photographer had taken before he backed out, and he agreed. He’d be a small piece of a larger story on treatment that a colleague was putting together. I read him the section I prepared, explaining that she would pull from it. Then he asked: Can I read the whole thing? I could tell he wasn’t trying to play me to manipulate the story. But he desperately needed to understand how we were presenting him, in context with the rest of the series.

In general, that answer is: Sorry, no. For myriad reasons. If we allowed subjects to preview every story, we’d never get anything done. People would try to take paint themselves in the best possible light, retract juicy bits, pitch holy hell about every piddling detail. That’s the fear.

There are strong policies against this practice at many news organizations. But Walt Harrington, one of my journalism gurus, gave a group of disciples his blessing to ignore those rules. At a conference a few years back, he shared that he usually reads lengthy narratives to his subjects as a kind of last interview. Ideally, you’ve spent so much time with them by this point that there are rarely any surprises, and there are times when a subject does correct errors of fact and/or interpretation.

I don’t fall back on Walt’s Rule often — maybe twice a year, and usually only on long narratives in which I’ve summarized mightily, putting my own spin on what I’ve observed and felt and gathered over the course of many interviews. Never has a subject surprised me by freaking out over my draft, for we’ve discussed the material at length many times before. Usually, the story gets better because the person finally figures out exactly what I’m trying to do.

Sometimes during the read-through I learn that I have a date, or color, or the fact of some random matter wrong. I remember the lawyer/marathon runner with stage-four cancer correcting me, gently pointing me toward a deeper understanding: No, it wasn’t the sleepless nights that got to her; it was the dreaming. “I was swimming across the ocean and had to reach the other side because there were children who needed me or they would die,” she said as I read her my draft.

Still, most old-school newspapers editors recoil at the idea of sharing stories before publication. But if bending our policy to help someone with a serious anxiety disorder feel calmer about seeing his name and face in print, I don’t see the harm.

It’s not like I’m breaking an actual law. That is, I’m not smoking hash with my subject, as was the case in a rapport-building reporting scenario described by Pulitzer-winning writer Gene Weingarten in a recent ethics session at the Mayborn literary nonfiction conference that was as hilarious as it was thought-provoking. Sure, I’ve had a beer or two with a subject when the occasion merits. On my beat, which tends to focus on immigrants and other underdogs, I’m more likely to be offered things like vegetables that have been washed in a fish pond (in rural Mexico), orange Fanta (by myriad Roanoke refugees who don’t know I’m borderline diabetic) or mystery desserts (one gooey concoction was made of gelatin, sugar and peanuts) or celebratory lamb that I’ve just watched a toddler walk through on the floor. (True stories, and the lamb was quite tasty!)

I’d rather get sick than offend a subject by refusing their homemade, hard-earned food. But relationship-building decisions are always are case by case, and it’s hard to understand — especially far away, from a news editor’s desk — how far a reporter should go to earn an important subject’s trust.

The best editors trust their people in the field. I’ll never forget going to managing editor Rich Martin in tears about a story I’d spent weeks researching. It was a juicy historical piece about the most sensational murder to hit Roanoke: In 1949 a 16-year-old Eagle Scout killed a beautiful Jefferson High School cheerleader in the basement of a prominent church. It made the covers of pulp magazines and commandeered our paper’s front page for months on end. People from their graduating class and others in the community still wonder what happened to the murderer after he got out of prison.

With the help of our savvy news researcher, Belinda Harris, I learned that he’d led a productive second life several states away, becoming a civic leader, church elder and businessman. He died without his children ever realizing his crime. I presume they’re still unaware.

“This story won’t help anybody; it’ll just injure us,” his sobbing widow told me in one of two brief conversations we had at the end of my reporting. “If you print this, you’ll have another obituary on your hands. Maybe more.”

It felt exactly like I’d made my 84-year-old mother cry.

I still have the lede and outline, myriad interviews with relatives from both families, recollections from people who worked the case and schoolmates who recall what they wore to her funeral. Every now and then someone calls out of the blue wanting to write a book or a screenplay about the tale, asking me to reveal the story’s end, or tell them how I found it. I don’t.

It was the best story I never wrote — an epic tale of violence and redemption. The end of innocence.

Someone else may very well finish the tale one day. But it won’t be me.

But don’t the man’s children have a right to know what he did? the students at the ethics conference wanted to know. What if an unsolved murder in his faraway state turns out to have involved him? How’d the victim’s family react to the prisoner’s early release?

Another student answered for me. “Was it a matter of ‘First, do no harm?’ ” she offered.

Yep, and knowing my own particular brand of midnight karma. If the story isn’t serving some sort of greater good, I won’t sleep well having told it.

Will it nag at you in the middle of the night? Will you make your mama cry? Those are the real ethical questions to ask.

14 Comments

by bethmacy on September 28, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in Gene Weingarten, Journalism, Journalism ethics, The Roanoke Times

Tagged Rich Martin

Posted by bethmacy on September 28, 2011

https://intrepidpapergirl.com/2011/09/28/journalism-ethics-mystery-desserts-midnight-karma-and-the-best-story-i-never-wrote/

Notes from a South African newsroom

CAPE TOWN — They giggled when I mentioned relying on our news researcher Belinda Harris, who helps Roanoke Times reporters research background and hard-to-find cellphone numbers. Come again? — the South African reporters wanted to know.

When I talked about working on projects for six, sometimes eight or more months at a time (usually amid other quicker-hit stories), there was a similar rumble of indignation.

The nine reporters who fill the 50,000-circulation, five-times-a-week Cape Times newspaper were hungry to learn more about sniffing out stories that lend themselves to narrative writing, I learned during my July 5 talk at the Irish-owned South African paper. About 20 employees of the Times, along with their sister publications (the Cape Argus, Weekend Argus, The Voice and Cape Community Newspapers) sat in on my presentation, which I gave halfway through my 12-day family vacation to visit our Nieman pals Janet Heard and Steve Pike with their kids, Tyler and Ella.

The Cape Times reporters had just covered Michelle Obama’s visit and are more accustomed to reporting on crime, trauma and marginalized communities than I am. About 15 million South Africans live on less than 15 rand a day — the equivalent of $2 U.S. dollars — and two of three children go to bed without a meal.

As we learned on our earlier tour of Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned most of his 27 years, the unofficial unemployment rate in the nation is 43 percent. Which explains why one former prisoner still spends day in and day out there: Not because he wants to relive the horror and drudgery but because he needs the tour-guide job. (Janet wrote an excellent piece about our visit to the World Heritage Site, explaining why Robben Island is due more praise than it has gotten in the recent past.)

At a rugby party on one of our first nights in South Africa, freelance journalist Tanya Farber recounted heartbreaking stories that she’s written in recent years, including a lid-popper about “corrective rape” — the township practice of raping lesbian women to “correct” them of their ways. Farber even managed to interview one of the perpetrators of the crime.

Most South African journalists seem to be so busy covering the plethora of breaking news stories, many of them routinely working 12 hours a day and reporting in three different languages, that they don’t have the luxury to write very many narratives — though their communities are teeming with juicy, heart-rending and heart-pounding stories to tell.

They’d also reported recently on the four Table Mountain muggings over the past two weeks — something Steve and Janet neglected to tell us about until we were well on our way up the eight-hour, 3,000-feet ascent up and around Platteklip Gorge — in the midst of a raging southeaster.

Janet, who is head of news at the Cape Times, said she found this point the most pertinent among those in my presentation: If you’re bored at work, maybe you’re boring. Because face it, there are great stories around us EVERYWHERE if only we bother to look — and to listen, with pure intention and genuine curiosity.

It’s even OK to fall in love with your subjects, sort of, I told them — as long as you heed New Yorker writer Katherine Boo’s advice: “I’m not writing you a love letter. I’m trying to create a portrait of you that your sister would recognize.”

I talked about the need to follow up with subjects and develop relationships on your beat: the reluctant father of the soldier with PTSD who finally decides he’s up for being interviewed three years after his son’s death; the retired copy editor (“sub editor,” in South Africa parlance) who asks me to tell her story before dementia destroys her ability to remember it; the routine Mother’s Day feature on a missionary who ends up inviting me to report on a team of doctors treating cholera in Haiti — during the November 2010 riots.

You never know where a subject will lead you. Jonathan Ancer, the narrative writing guru and group trainer for Independent Newspapers who hosted my talk, is about to publish a riveting five-part serial tracing the journey of his checkbook after it was stolen from him in a burglary earlier this year.

Reporters in South Africa face different challenges than we do. But they stand up at noon to cluster around the TV, checking out the competition, just like we do. They struggle mightily with limited resources, just like we do (maybe even more so, actually). But their biggest challenge isn’t just the Internet; only 10.8 percent of the country has Internet access. It’s also illiteracy, combined with new and very serious government threats to press freedom.

Yet in Cape Town alone, there are about five daily newspapers, more including the tabloids. Two of the broadsheets are written in Afrikaans.

And every day reporters at the Cape Times work doggedly to ferret out stories of corruption, filing multiple stories and speaking multiple languages and knowing in their hearts that if they don’t write it, nobody will. Their tenacity was downright inspiring.

Hours after my talk, a young Capetonian e-mailed me asking me to read and offer feedback on several of her stories. “I am open to criticism,” she wrote. “It is important for growth.”

Trainer Jonathan Ancer, Editor Alide Dasnois, Head of News Janet Heard and me.

7 Comments

by bethmacy on July 11, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in Diversity, Journalism, Journalism ethics, Photojournalism, South Africa

Posted by bethmacy on July 11, 2011

https://intrepidpapergirl.com/2011/07/11/same-challenges-in-south-african-newsrooms-with-a-twist/

Old-school lessons for the new-media generation

I spoke to a wonderful gathering of journalism students recently at the Ferrum College Women’s Leadership Conference, which gave me a chance to think about the things I’ve learned about journalism in 25 years — mostly by trial-and-error. By screwing up first, I mean.

I was also able to work a very important fact into my talk: Sources say that, apparently, I smell quite like Beyonce. (Sorry, the Internet does not provide scratch-and-sniff services at this time.)

Here’s the speech:

Journalism professor Lana Whited has asked me to talk to you today about being an intrepid paper girl in a multiplatform world. In the past year, I’ve blogged, shot video and posted it online, posted pictures to Facebook, used Facebook to find sources and keep in touch with them, written stories that have appeared in both newspapers and magazines and a trade journal — both in print and online.

But here’s the thing I’m discovering about having one foot in old media and the other in the new: The story is still the thing. Social media is well and good, but without the ability to go out and really engage with people who live outside our social and virtual worlds; to talk to them about their desires and fears and memories and dreams and to REALLY LISTEN to what they have to say— we aren’t helping connect people to one another in a way that helps them understand the larger world.

Take, for example, this photo, by my former colleague Josh Meltzer, taken on the first day of school for a group of Somali Bantu refugee kids. Assuming you’re not yourself a Somali Bantu, is this an image you would have seen on your Facebook page or twitter accounts? Doubt it. But underneath that beautiful picture – of kids clutching their teacher’s hand on the way to their very first sip of water from a drinking fountain – lies one heckuva story.

It’s not going to present itself to you on a social media platter, though. To get a story like this, you have to go out and engage with the real world.

As Ursula LeGuin wrote: “The story is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”

Eons of genetic and cultural programming compel us to narratives with moral lessons, to stories with beginnings and endings.

Today I’m going to meld my own story in with five lessons I’d like to impart to you — themes that I wish I’d known when I was your age and just starting my career, back when I had no idea what it meant to be a “working mom” or wife or journalist/writer/teacher.

The first point comes courtesy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote that real courage is having the guts to do the thing you haven’t before done. In other words, take risks.

So picture me in the fall 1982, in the flat cornfields of northwest Ohio. I’m 18, and my Mom is driving me to college for the first time. We’re in her rusted-out Mustang with my life’s belongings — my Neil Young album collection, my stuffed Ziggy, my clothes jammed into milk crates I’d filched from behind the Dairy Queen.

My family is so poor that I qualify for full financial aid, which covers my tuition, room and board. Heck, if I put in a few hours each week mixing chemicals for the photojournalism department and writing briefs for the public relations office, Bowling Green State University is basically paying me to attend.

When I first got to college, I felt like a food-stamp recipient in the checkout line at a Whole Foods. But I quickly became a master at the fine art of fitting in. The one thing I’d NEVER talked about with my friends, though, was my Dad, who had died, of lung cancer and alcoholism, the year before. Then a feature-writing professor gave us a class assignment to write a personal essay and send it off to a real publication. I was nervous as a wet cat about sharing the complicated story of my relationship with my Dad, but I wrote, I gulped several times (and cried a lot), and I sent it off.

When the piece was published in Seventeen magazine, I got letters from people all over the country, saying they had been there, too, and thanking me for inspiring them to forgive.

I realized then what writers had the power to do: to make people understand themselves, and each other. I also realized, probably for the first time, that poverty wasn’t something to be ashamed of. It made me a more empathetic journalist, drawn to telling stories of the voiceless, and it gave me good material to draw from — if only I was willing to take risks and tell the real, unvarnished truth.

I moved to Roanoke in 1989 to write features for the Roanoke Times, and I’ve worked there on and off ever since. Last year, I was lucky enough to win a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard, where I had the privilege of getting to know some of the finest journalists from across the globe: a British war photographer who covered conflicts from Cambodia to Iraq and who was kidnapped in Gaza; an editor who covered the end of Apartheid in South Africa; a BBC reporter in Zimbabwe keeps her work secret from the government; a science writer from the Washington Post who recently wrote a book called “The Hidden Brain.”

Some of them wanted to know why I stay in Roanoke when there’s such tragedy and intrigue going on in bigger cities and far-flung locales?

The answer is: There’s tragedy and intrigue going on here, too. But you have to work harder to find it.

This brings me to my second major piece of career advice: Find mentors — no matter what level you’re at; no matter where on earth you are — and never stop growing.

I was lucky to latch on pretty quickly to one of my first journalism mentors, a reporter named Mary Bishop who covered minority affairs, neighborhoods and the environment for our paper. Mary had been a Pulitzer Prize-winning Philadelphia Inquirer reporter before she moved to Roanoke to be closer to her parents, and I consider it my great good fortune to have been able to talk out my problems with her in person, on the phone and over e-mail for two decades. She’s coached me on problems with stories, problems with relationships, problems in life.

Mary taught me a lot of nitty-gritty things about reporting — that the kitchen is the best place to do an interview at someone’s house, for instance. But she modeled for me two far more important things. The first I discovered in the early ‘90s when I dropped by her house on Christmas Eve to give her a gift, and I couldn’t find her anywhere. I later learned that she’d been out all day driving around — delivering Christmas gifts to some of the needy people she’d written about that year.

Mary showed me that it was OK to care about the people we write about. She also taught me that, while Roanoke might not be a place for big breaking news, there was definitely news there. You just had to dig a little harder for it.

For one thing, race scholars have deemed it one of the most segregated cities in the South, a fact I’ve seen play out again and again — in terms of housing, schools and a disproportionately small black middle class. In the mid-90s I wrote a series that examined why we had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the state. In a story about how teen pregnancy had become destigmatized, I focused on a pair of teenage best friends who were both 16 and both pregnant. “If she was pregnant and I wasn’t, I knew I’d have to be,” one of them said.

I was away on vacation the week the story ran, and so I wasn’t around when the headline writer labeled the story “Pregnant and Proud,” and chose an almost clowning picture of them for the lead photo.

The story generated so much response that the editor actually had to call in extra editorial assistants to answer the phones. It made the national talk radio circuit. A lot of folks were calling me racist, saying I was intent on destroying the girls I’d profiled. A social worker wrote: “The girls could not have known the impact this would have on their young lives; this newspaper could not have not known.” Other critics said I glamorized them.

Finally, after more than a month of daily letters to the editor — nearly all of them critical — someone wrote in and said:

“You would have thought that Beth Macy had personally impregnated several minors from the responses you’re getting. To fix a problem, you first must see it.” That series won statewide public-service journalism honors and a Southern Journalism Award for investigative reporting, and it sparked the creation of a citywide task force that led to a city office dedicated to prevention.

But it also taught me to think harder about how I presented people — and what impact my words could have on their lives. The girls dropped out of school soon after the story ran. I learned recently that, 16 years later, one of them just got out of jail, and the daughter she was pregnant with when I met her 17 years ago has already become a mother herself. The other woman is doing well, working as a fast-food manager-in-training. (And I’m in the process of trying to do an update story on her now.)

Whether or not there’s a direct correlation between the story and some of the bad things that transpired for these two, I have no way of knowing. But it has weighed on me over the years.

Which is another thing about being a reporter in a mid-sized city. Make no mistake: You WILL run into the people you write about at the grocery — one way or another you WILL be accountable. Some people will ask you to write their obituaries when they die; others might even think to call you when they’ve just invited their well-heeled friends over for ladies’ bridge club luncheon — and a rat turns up uninvited. I like that.

My mentor Mary was an unintentional model for the third point I’d like to get across to you today: There’s a big world awaiting you outside of work. No matter what field you go into, make time for friends and family.

This is something I still struggle with when I find myself in total stress mode about a story. Mary herself got so worked up over big projects that she used to develop an eye tic — and once stashed a bottle of whiskey in her desk drawer to calm her down enough to write. I can get so ratcheted up when I think I’m sitting on top of a great story that I can’t sleep until I nail down the first draft.

Both of us have struggled to find balance in our lives. It’s a trial-and-error thing for me that continues to evolve. I happen to know that I get a little nutty if I don’t sweat every day. In the winter that means going to the Y every morning before work. When it’s warm, my husband and I climb Mill Mountain in the predawn, while the kids are still asleep. I spend more time outside weeding and planting and replanting than is probably healthy for me or my plants.

I try to spend time cooking for and talking to and laughing with my kids, now 12 and 17. I try to always have something we’re looking forward to doing together, whether it’s looking at colleges with the teenager or going into debt for our upcoming, once-in-a-lifetime trip to Africa.

When a story drives me crazy, it helps to talk it out with people I trust — friends like Mary, or my husband, or an editor. I’ve learned that I work best when I stay organized. Here’s a picture my husband took when I was trying to make sense of some 50 interviews I did for a 2010 series on Lyme Disease. Note the dog, Lucky, who has a knack for being exactly where you don’t want him to be no matter what you’re doing. It looks messy but, trust me, this is Martha Stewart neat compared to what our newsroom looks like — and I actually know where everything is.

What I’m describing here is a life of trying to balance family with work; balancing taking care of others with taking care of yourself. It sounds simple and reductive, like one of those how-to guides you read in women’s magazines.

But it can be tiring and guilt-inducing (especially the parenting part), and often you feel like you’re not doing a great job at home OR at work. Bad things will sometimes happen, depressing things — teenagers, for instance. As Anne Lamott writes: “Life with teenagers was like having a low-grade bladder infection. It hurt, but you had to tough it out.”

When my kids were little, I left the paper for three years, during which time I taught writing part-time at Hollins University and Virginia Western and did a little freelancing during the day — while hopefully the kids napped. I ate a lot of really bad Whopper Juniors with cheese in the play zone of the Burger King on Franklin Road. On a good day, I could get an entire class of English comp papers graded while my little ones ate greasy chicken nuggets and disappeared in those primary-colored plastic tubes.

When I returned to my newspaper in 2000, I didn’t set out to focus on outsiders and underdogs, but those were always the stories I wrote best: The lawyer with stage-four melanoma who bucked her doctor’s two-month prognosis and, instead of getting her affairs in order, ran a marathon.I wrote about an important antebellum-era black educator whose story had never been told, even though she’d been a huge influence on black Roanokers, including Oliver Hill, the architect of Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation lawsuit.

Research for that piece led me to the Gainsboro Library, which gave me a wonderful glimpse into the history of black Roanoke. . . and introduced me to a 16-year-old wunderkind, who reshelved books. Salena Sulliva had grown up in the projects – but, with the backing of a powerfully strong African-American community at this library and a devoted single mom, she got a full ride to Harvard.

Which is another huge perk of staying in one place. Not only will your pal the librarian call you to say that Salena’s about to hear from colleges, and you really need to be there if you still want to follow up.

But when a plane full of barefoot Somali Bantu refugees lands on the airport tarmac, the head of the local refugee office will tell you that a helluva story awaits.

My husband and I had been mentoring a family of Liberian refugees, Zeor and Tailey Dolue – helping them fill out forms, teaching them to drive, taking them to job interviews and to Wal-mart, the only place they could buy “fish with heads.” I’ll never forget watching Zeor squeal with delight at the sound of a Diet Coke can clunking from the machine.

“There is a person inside that machine!” she said.

I was too close to Zeor to write about her — she has a niece in a Ghanian refugee camp right now whose name is Beth Macy Glay. But knowing Zeor made me realize that I wanted to help readers see themselves anew, somehow, through these new immigrants’ eyes.

Photo by Josh Meltzer | The Roanoke Times

So back to the Tarmac, and the shoeless mother. That was the starting point for a 2005 series on how these new African refugees were assimilating — or not, as was sometimes the case — into our midsized city.

I wasn’t sure how to frame the story at first. But my longtime collaborator, photog Josh Meltzer, had noticed that many of the Somalis were living in a single apartment complex — along with Cubans and Bosnians and working class whites and blacks.

Now even though Terrace Apartments was located not more than five blocks away from my own house, I’d never really seen it the way Josh did: as the most diverse nine acres in one of the most segregated cities in the South. Which brings me to my fourth lesson of the today: Embrace collaboration and change.

Josh’s curiosity drove me to see the place as the vehicle for telling this complicated but classic immigrant story. It was the first of three big multimedia projects we worked on together — each of which won national awards and brought us accolades and led to good things in our career. Josh won a Fulbright and then landed a full-time professorship; I went to Harvard, which has helped usher in new opportunities including freelance writing and a little bit of international reporting. In November, I won a travel grant to cover a medical mission in Haiti, a trip sponsored by the Dart Society for Trauma and Journalism in conjunction with the Nieman Foundation.

So no matter what field you go into these days, especially if it involves online communication, you are going to have to collaborate. Which is a business-y way of saying: Share your toys. Build meaningful friendships with colleagues that hinge on trust, honesty and mutual respect. Drink hoppy beer with them and make them meals when their wives have babies and, above all, wish them well. Your work will be better if you do.

I’ve been lucky enough to work on some groundbreaking projects as journalism has had to sail through some pretty rocky shoals in order to reinvent itself. The story is still the thing, yes, but I’ve had to learn that I’m not the only one charged with telling it. Whereas it used to be just me and a single photographer on assignment, now I’m also working with videographers, multimedia producers, computer animators and data editors who use numbers to map out demographic trends.

I’ve learned to write and record narrative voiceovers for online slideshows; to be interviewed myself for television, radio and Web sites. I’ve learned how to set up and run my own blog for both personal and career use. I’ve used (and admit I’m a little addicted to) Facebook as a way to communicate with readers, solicit ideas and help get my stories out to a wider audience. Oh, and to post videos of my 12-year-old son playing his first jam session with a group of real musicians. The song was The Beatles’ “Come Together,” and I recorded it (shakily) on my phone.

In Haiti — where you can’t count on anything — I was supposed to cover a Salem-based medical mission in Port-au-Prince. But when the cholera epidemic broke out, the medical team was flown via U.N. helicopter to Northern Haiti, where we spent four days in the midst of heartbreak, chaos and life or death decisions.

One woman showed up at the hospital with two sick children, having walked in from the countryside. Her husband and mother had died on the way there, and she’d had to leave them by the side of the road — or risk losing her kids, too.

I kept in touch with readers back home via a newsroom blog and Facebook, trying to describe scenes like this:

Sounds from the cholera shelter: The slap of a doctor’s hand on a child’s arm, trying to raise a vein. A baby whimpering. An old man in a cowboy hat humming his wife to sleep. A young man with Dengue fever and legs afire who wants me to know, in perfect English: “I am a teacher.”

The photographer was unable to accompany us at the last minute, so I was suddenly charged with shooting pictures and video while taking notes for the print narrative I would write after we returned home. I even set up and gave an interview for a report on Public Radio International’s “The World” from the hospital where we were based. Talk about multiplatform!

As rioting broke out around us and we found ourselves trapped for a day by the very people we were trying to help, I kept on reporting: madly note-taking, audio- and video-recording, taking pictures and sanitizing hands. It was one of the toughest, scariest and most exhilarating days of my career.

Which brings me to my last piece of advice: Always, always follow your gut. In journalism, it’s that flicker in the back of your head that seems to be telling you: This is a story worth pursuing. This is a person I need to keep in touch with because I have a feeling the story’s not over yet. (It rarely is.)

This is one of the best perks of being a journalist: Not only do you get to spend much of your time away from the office, you get to know people in the midst of amazing perseverance, tragedy and triumph. You get to listen. You get to be curious. And if you do both of these things with the purest of intentions, not only will you get to produce a good story that can educate or entertain or maybe even enlighten readers. But you yourself can be moved. I still have days where I can’t believe they’re paying me to do the job!

That scared 18-year-old who got to go to college on a full Pell grant? I actually got to meet Senator Claiborne Pell in 1998, for a series of articles I wrote about the erosion of federal need-based aid.

The 10-part series on caregiving for the elderly that landed me the Harvard fellowship? It all began in 2006 when I ran into a recently retired copy editor who happened to live next door to my babysitter. We were at her college graduation party when Lynn Forbish came up to me, her auburn wig askew and a glass of chardonnay teetering in her hand: “I retired because I have dementia — in case you didn’t know!” she said.

She asked me to write her story before she forgot it as a way to help other families struggling with caregiving and dementia. I knew I was sitting on top of a good story when she said, “Some days I can’t remember whether my bra hooks in the front or the back.”

More than a dozen articles later, I have an essay about Lynn in the March issue of Oprah magazine.

The story in Haiti came about because I got in touch with the Salem missionary I’d written a 2009 Mother’s Day feature about when the earthquake descended on Port-au-Prince some eight months later. Nearly a year after that, I found myself running a series of roadblocks run by machete-wielding thugs. I found myself in a cholera-ward overflow tent, holding my headlamp in the dark so a doctor could see to insert an IV.

Not long ago, I was riding a school bus for immigrant students in Roanoke when up climbed a little girl named Jamika, a kindergartener who spontaneously gave me a hug. Then another. Then another.

“You smell good, like Beyonce,” she told me. Then she said: “You a little bit old —but I like you.”

I got the bus driver to take a picture of us and posted it, immediately, on Facebook. Of course.

I’m not rich by any means, but I wouldn’t trade my experiences for all the six-figure salary jobs in the world.

So remember these hard-earned lessons: take risks, find mentors at every stage of the game, make time for friends and family, embrace collaboration and always, always go with your gut.

You could end up in a Third World cholera ward. Or at a marathon in Big Sur. Or you could end up on a school bus in Southeast Roanoke, smelling like Beyonce and laughing so hard you think you’re going to cry.

13 Comments

by bethmacy on April 1, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in Diversity, Journalism, Journalism ethics, work-life balance

Posted by bethmacy on April 1, 2011

https://intrepidpapergirl.com/2011/04/01/old-school-lessons-for-the-new-media-generation/

Searching out change lessons from the center of the storm

For a Kennedy School class I’m taking called Public Narrative, today I was tasked with presenting a paper about continuity and change as it affects the journalism industry — and what leadership lessons my peers and I can take from it. As I was writing this yesterday, I learned that one of my dearest reporter friends was laid off from the Associated Press. Talk about a reality check. Sometimes I feel like the proverbial fish who has no idea he’s in water — because that’s all he knows. It’s hard to sort out the lessons of this journalistic storm when you’re still stuck in the eye of it. But here’s one rambling attempt. . . .

Last year was the worst year ever for journalism in general and for my newsroom in particular. While we didn’t suffer layoffs at my paper (a rarity in the industry), we have had furloughs and buyouts. Our staff shrank mightily, with so many empty desks that the bosses finally had the maintenance guys rearrange the furniture — adding a red couch and a seating area to camouflage the loss. It didn’t work. The truth is, the few of us remaining are so busy that nobody has time to actually sit a spell on the couch.

Morale, as you might guess, is at an all-time low for journalists everywhere. As veteran journalists, we’ve all had several choices presented to us: Do we join the hundreds of other journalists who have jumped ship pre-emptively, getting out of the business before they’re forced? Or do we stay and fight? If we do stay, how as a reporter do we continue doing what we love as the industry shifts from old media to the new? How do we embrace change when we can’t even count on having a job from one week to the next?

Last week, I wrote about my attempt to turn the story of my industry’s loss into a story of redemption; how I’ve tried to reframe the dread-filled conversations that dominate newspapers across the country by inspiring other reporters to remember why it is we were originally called to tell the stories of the downtrodden and the corrupt; how to make the public’s business known. Some call me a Pollyanna, but I’m trying to convince the naysayers in my industry that we can reinvent ourselves but only if we invent new ways of working — and of working better together. That we have to change is evident; what’s less clear is whether we can hold onto our core journalistic values as we commence the metamorphosis. In this age of politically leaning blogs and shouting cable TV hosts, remembering our values of fairness and civic responsibility may be the only thing that saves us. Waving the white flag of surrender sure won’t.

I’ve come to Harvard this year to learn more about families, immigrants and the elderly, which are my specialty areas. I’ve also begun to study theories of collaboration, because I believe that journalists are going to have to learn to share their toys. Papers that used to compete vigorously are already starting to share resources; TV, radio and print are beginning to form unprecedented partnerships. I’ve also decided to use this year away as a time to learn new skills in radio, video and Web design — something few reporters have the luxury of doing because of all those empty desks I mentioned at the start.

The reporter who outlasts the apocalypse, I predict, will be the one who trains herself, in effect, to be a multimedia producer but still knows how to tell the hell out of a good story. She’ll also learn to give younger, Web-savvy readers a reason to go to newspaper Web sites — by offering personal commentary and by interacting with readers/viewers.

It’s an awkward time for journalists: We’re trying to prepare for a Web-based future — but we’re scared because we don’t know exactly what that future is, or whether there’ll be a place for us in it. And oh-yeah-by-the-way: We still have a little thing called a newspaper to put out every day.

Honestly, I don’t know how this narrative will end, or what leadership lessons, if any, we will have learned. I attend at least one “future of news” panel discussion a week, and — reading between the lines spoken by the smartest people in this business — it seems like no one knows.

But if we retain our core values of fairness and public responsibility, I think it’s possible that we’ll look back on this tumultuous period as a time when our century-old institutions kicked it into high gear and birthed a new kind of storytelling — one that still helps people understand their world and each other. Instead of writing our narratives as obituaries, I hope we’ll look back and tell a story about how we changed so much on the surface — but how, down deep, we didn’t change at all.

1 Comment

by bethmacy on November 19, 2009 • Permalink

Posted in Are newspapers dying?, Digital journalism, Journalism, Journalism ethics

Tagged Future of journalism, Harvard, Marshall Ganz, Nieman Foundation

Posted by bethmacy on November 19, 2009

https://intrepidpapergirl.com/2009/11/19/searching-out-change-lessons-from-the-center-of-the-storm/

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CAPE TOWN — They giggled when I mentioned relying on our news researcher Belinda Harris, who helps Roanoke Times reporters research background and hard-to-find cellphone numbers. Come again? — the South African reporters wanted to know.

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