|
| |
Mencher: A Look Inside the Newsroom
From: Columbia University
| By:
Melvin Mencher |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
What is journalism, and how do journalists do their jobs? Most of us come in contact with journalism on a daily, even hourly, basis. But many of us may not really know how the news is put together. In the following article, Columbia University emeritus professor of journalism Melvin Mencher describes the core practices of contemporary journalism. |
In this article, we'll be looking at a newspaper reporter new on the job, an experienced TV reporter, a veteran police reporter, a reporter using a database for his story and the specialists who work for business magazines, a fast-growing field that has attracted many journalism graduates. |
Different as their workplaces may be, they all share a way of going about their work, a commitment to accuracy and fairness and the conviction that their work is important. |
An announcement and a fire
We are in the newsroom of a Midwestern newspaper with a circulation of 25,000. The telephone on the city editor's desk rings and, after listening for a moment, the city editor calls out to a young reporter, "Bob, the publicity director of the Lions Club has a story." |
The caller tells the reporter his club intends to donate some equipment to a city playground next Saturday at 10 a.m. at a ceremony the governor will attend. |
The reporter calls the governor's press secretary to check the governor's itinerary in case he is making other local stops. In 15 minutes, he has written a short piece, putting the governor in the lead. He again checks the date, time and location of the ceremony against his notes. |
A few minutes later, he is told to cover a fire with a photographer. |
An hour later, Bob returns to the newsroom. |
Human interest
"It was a small fire, about $7,500 in damages, but there's some good human interest in it," he tells the city editor. |
"Don't tell me you've got three columns on a three-paragraph fire, Bob," the city editor replies. "What's it about?" |
Without looking at his notes, he answers. "The story isn't the fire but the background. I found out the family bought the house a few months ago. They had just remodeled it, and this week the wife went to work to help pay for it. She leaves their 10-year-old boy home with his 12-year-old brother for a few hours every day. |
"Well, the 12-year-old wanted to make some money cutting grass. He knows they're short of money. He was filling the lawn mower with gasoline in the garage when the tank tipped over against the water heater. Whoosh. Lucky he wasn't hurt." |
The city editor thinks a moment. |
"Got any good quotes from the older boy?" he asks. |
"Well, it sounds as though it's worth more than a couple of paragraphs. But don't make it a chapter in the book, Bob." |
At his desk, Bob pauses before writing. He can start his story like most accounts of fires he has read: |
A fire of accidental origin caused $7,500 in damages to a dwelling at 1315 New Hampshire St. today.
No one was injured in the blaze that started in the garage when the 12-year-old son of the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Earl Ruman.... |
Direct lead
He has put a direct news lead on the story, which he knows his newspaper prefers for stories of this sort. But he is unhappy with this start. This is not the way he described the fire to the editor, he recalls. Then he remembers advice he was given by a reporter: "Every story demands to be told a certain way. Don't impose form or style on it. The way you write it has to flow from the nature of the event." |
The nature of the story was the youngster's good intentions gone awry. So he starts again: |
Two months ago, Mr. and Mrs. Earl Ruman moved into a three bedroom house at 1315 New Hampshire St. It was their dream house.
After years of skimping and saving...
At this rate, he will write the book his editor warned him against, he thinks. Although he wants a dramatic story--one that will build to a climax--he cannot take forever to develop the point. Readers will drift away. |
Feature lead
His editor has been telling his reporters to try for feature-type leads when the event makes it possible. Perhaps this is one of those events. The youngster is the heart of the story, he reasons, and the boy must go into the lead. He tries again: |
Teddy Ruman knew his father and mother had skimped and saved to put aside enough money to buy their dream house at 1315 New Hampshire St. |
This morning, he decided to help, too. But his well-intentioned efforts turned into tragedy. |
That seems to be more like it. In 40 minutes, he has the story in good shape, he thinks.
The city editor reads through the copy. |
"Yes, it's a sad story," he tells his cub reporter. "It's hardly a tragedy, but it would be sadder if they didn't have insurance to cover their loss." |
Bob makes for the telephone on his desk. He remembers another bit of advice: "Don't leave unanswered any questions the reader may have. Don't leave any holes in your story." |
Next, to another fire, this one far more serious, covered by a TV reporter. |
TV covers a fire
It is Christmas Day in the newsroom of a television station. A teletype clicks off a story about a fire in a small town in New Jersey. The AP reports that while a family was asleep, a fire broke out and flames raced through their house. Four died. Only two boys escaped. |
The news editor calls to a reporter, "Elaine, take this one on." |
On the way to the fire, Elaine thinks of questions to ask and the locations in which to shoot the story. |
"When I go out on an assignment I am conscious of the need for pictures," she said later. "I look for things that have an immediate impact, because I have a short time to tell the story--maybe two and a half minutes. |
"So I look for the strongest statement in a talk, the most emotionally appealing part of the running story. When I arrive at a story, I want to be the first one to interview the eyewitness, so that the person is still experiencing the event. The emotional facts have to tell the story." |
On the scene, Elaine learns from the fire chief that the surviving youngsters had run to a neighbor's house during the fire. As crews from competing stations arrive, she and her crew approach the neighbor's house through the backyard to avoid being spotted. |
"When I spoke to the woman next door, I asked her what happened when the boys burst into her home. She became tense and distraught as she described one boy's face, burned and blackened by the fire," Elaine recalled. |
"On a breaking story, a broadcast journalist usually asks fewer questions than the print journalist. On this story all I needed to ask the neighbor was two or three questions and let her tell the story." |
On the return drive, Elaine structures the script in her mind. She has pictures of the fire scenes and interviews of the neighbor and the fire chief. She works the script around these, the most dramatic shots. |
A child's death
It was a drive-by shooting. The victim: 2-year-old Heather Brown. The family had been to church and stopped on the way home at McDonald's for ice cream. At home, Heather was fidgety and wouldn't go to sleep, so her father took her into the living room and began to rock her to sleep on the couch. |
Suddenly, 60 high-caliber slugs tore into the house. One struck Heather in the head and she died in her father's arms. |
For Diane Sugg of the Sacramento Bee the story was not so much the shooting death but the story of a lovable little girl. She found that story by driving out to the Valley Christian Church and waiting for its pastor, A.D. Olivan. He was close to Heather's parents and had spoken to them since the shooting. |
Sugg had telephoned the minister, but he didn't want to talk, so she drove to the church and waited. One hour. Two. After three hours he arrived, and Sugg persuaded him to talk to her about the child, who used to run around the church singing to herself and hugging everyone she saw. There was something special about Heather, and everyone knew it. |
"I would never have gotten Heather's story if I hadn't waited in a dark parking lot for three hours, hoping the family's pastor would come back to the church," Sugg says. "He did, and he could see I was sincere." |
Las Vegas crime
It's a short hop from Sacramento to Carson City, Nevada, where Brendan Riley of the AP has been working on a story about crime in Las Vegas, the fastest-growing city in the United States. Riley is especially interested in the effectiveness of the Las Vegas Metro Police Department in solving crimes. |
By digging into the FBI database on crime, www.fbi.gov/ucr/crimeus/crimeus.htm, Riley has found a good story: Las Vegas police solve only a fifth of the violent crimes committed in the city. This is the worst rate in the country. |
Riley runs the data by the police and asks for comments. The response he gets sends him scurrying back to his figures. The police say their data shows Las Vegas has problems solving crimes, but it definitely isn't the lowest-ranking city in the country in this category. Miami, San Francisco and several others are worse, they tell him. In fact, a department spokesman says, Las Vegas is seventh or eighth worst. |
Riley checks his data and compares it with the material the Las Vegas police have made available to him. |
He spots the reason for the difference. "Either accidentally or deliberately, Metro failed to count one of the lesser crime categories," Riley says. "That has the effect of skewing the numbers so Las Vegas doesn't look so bad." Riley stands by his numbers. But he will need comments from the police about the reasons for the low ranking. |
He will also need comments from an outside authority, someone at the University of Nevada who is an expert on criminal justice. And he wants human interest. After all, a numbers story is not the most interesting reading. |
Human interest
The logical person to try to reach is a crime victim, someone involved in an unsolved crime. |
Riley locates Joyce McKay in Fresno, California. Her son and his girlfriend were shot to death in Las Vegas. Riley puts this human interest as high in the story as he can. He quotes McKay: "There's no closure. It's an ugly thing and an ugly feeling to be left with." |
Expert's comments
For an interpretation of the figures from outside the police department, Riley turns to Grant Stitt, chairman of the criminal justice department at the University of Nevada, Reno, who is quoted as saying, "To a certain extent, it shows what the police are up against. You can have a very effective police force, but also have a community full of criminals. The police may be as effective as possible, but that's all they can do." |
Riley quotes the police as saying the force has 1.54 officers per 1,000 Las Vegas residents, well below the national average. Add tourists to the population figure, and the ratio of officers to residents is even lower. Also, Riley quotes Stitt as saying, the voters refused to approve a bond issue that would have expanded the jail. "We live in a democratic society," Stitt says, "and the police are an agency of government. We pay for government, and we get what we pay for." |
With this quotation, Riley ends his story. |
The computer revolution
The computer has become as much a reporting tool as the telephone and the tape recorder. As journalism enters the new century, new reporting practices have taken hold and changed the journalist into what Stephen Miller of the New York Times calls "the multi-media reporter." This new-style journalist uses all the available tools in reporting--online databases, e-mail, spreadsheets, websites, Windows and the other newer tools along with the traditional ones. |
We saw how Riley dug into FBI data for his story. The available material is endless. Reporters have used data from the Census Bureau, www.census.gov, to compare their city's growth with others in the state, and they have used information on air quality from the Environmental Protection Agency, www.epa.gov, to see whether pollution is up or down. |
Some projects
Cities, states and the federal government are putting their records into databases, which makes the information fingertip-accessible. Mike Trautmann of the Argus Leader cross-matched the computerized list of private lawyers doing state work with another computerized list of contributors to gubernatorial and legislative races. |
In Austin, Stuart Eskenazi and Jeff South analyzed Texas public-safety records and found that more than 118,000 motorists were driving without insurance, and that a fourth of all accidents involved uninsured drivers. |
A frequent use of city databases is the determination of how much city-worker overtime is costing. Trautmann found $1 million was paid out by Sioux Falls, and in Austin, South and Mike Todd discovered that dozens received more than $15,000 a year each in overtime payments. |
Polluters
The Plain Dealer in Cleveland checked records of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to find that sewage plants were routinely accepting radioactive waste from hospitals, universities and other sources. In California, the McClatchy Newspapers analyzed pesticide reports to learn that a health threat existed in the populated area of the Central Valley. |
A reporter for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans who was working on the decline of the world's fisheries navigated among the Internet e-mail discussion groups. He read the messages scientists were sending each other and gathered useful material. Then he identified himself and asked for help with his reporting project. "It was amazing," he said. "Not only were they eager to help, but they bent over backwards to get things to us." |
Contributors
"The power of the database is that you can make connections that were difficult before," Miller says. One of the most frequently used databases during political campaigns is the one maintained by the Federal Election Commission, www.tray.com/fecinfo. The commission lists the names of donors, their occupations and employers, ZIP codes, how much money they donated and to whom. Reporters use the information to see what influence money seeks to buy from officials. |
"It's tough to find a story that doesn't have numbers in it," Miller says, and "the spreadsheet is the key to digging into these stories." |
City guides
The computer, via the Internet, has made it possible for news organizations to put information on the screen for use at home and the office. Many newspapers have online versions with links to the longer stories. One of the newer news services is the localized city guide. America Online operates Digital City, which provides links to local newspapers. Yahoo! Metros integrates news stories into its local guides. Knight-Ridder uses editorial content from its 28 local newspapers for Real Cities. Writers for the seven city guides summarize news stories from the traditional media for the guides. |
Business magazines
We all know about the general business publications--Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, The Wall Street Journal. But there is another group of publications less well known, the specialized business publications that focus on specific subjects. One such publication, Electronic Business, spent eight months gathering information on how Russia stole US electronic science and technology. |
An Automotive Industries reporter looked into Japanese automobile factories for an article comparing them with US factories. He found that Japan's "secret weapon" is more efficient use of resources. |
More than 4,000 business publications serve a wide variety of trades, professions and industries. |
|
| |
