Peter Boody's Blog: Inside Out: a not-so-smalltown editor's life - Posts Tagged "journalism"
Teach kids to write news and save the country
(From my column in the Shelter Island Reporter this past summer}
A few generations ago, people who couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything else could always find a job in the news business and do pretty well in it. All they had to know was how to think logically and how to write clearly and pretty much everybody with at least a C average, back in those days, could do both.
Need a job? Go be a reporter until you find yourself. Just maybe you’ll discover that you like the gig. If not, it will put a few dollars in your pocket and teach you how to work hard and meet deadlines while you ponder the future.
From coast to coast, in small towns and big cities, kids learned grammar and sentence structure and had to master expository writing. I remember the red ink in the margins of my early efforts: “Clarity.” “Diction.” “Grammar.” “Logic.” Seeing those words on the page meant those things were missing or problematic.
So much has changed. An education is no longer an end unto itself, a good thing to have because it will make you a better person, a better member of the community, a better citizen — a thoughtful, independent person who can express him or herself effectively.
More than ever, education now is about the fragmented national economy and finding a place in it. Getting an education is just another consumer item now, with students and their parents publicly assessing the quality of their teachers and how much bang they’re getting for their tuition or tax bucks. That makes students the judges which, in some ways, turns the academic world upside down.
Everyone’s heard the bad news about American kids lagging behind those in many other countries with their math and science skills. I don’t recall hearing much about their verbal and writing skills. But as someone who has hired many young people over the years to work as cub reporters, it’s my opinion that writing skills have been on the decline for decades.
One clue is the fact that so many job applicants submit clips from their college newspapers that are not hard news stories but music or movie reviews, opinion pieces, or personal essays. Or there might be a light feature, written in the first person and full of hyperbole, as might be expected of a barely rewritten press release.
Self-indulgence doesn’t work well in a hard news story. Is that why nobody wants to write them anymore? It has been many, many years since I’ve seen a good hard news story in a job applicant’s clips. It gives me the impression that a lot of high school and college newspapers are full of fluffy writing. That means, to me, their publications aren’t really newspapers and the students writing for them are not learning how to be journalists.
How would they know the difference? So few young people read newspapers. They don’t even watch network news, which is no longer an example of well-written, well-edited journalism anyway: stories are pretty vague and fuzzy and too full of unanswered questions. But it’s about as close as mass culture can get these days to old-fashioned news, at least in its essential form.
You may ask: So what, Mr. Grump? So what if kids are clueless about old-fashioned newspaper writing?
A person who could write a good news story, if required to do so in some gruesome spot test, knows how to:
• Think logically and critically in order to assess a topic and decide what questions need to be to asked to fully explain it from beginning to end.
• Suppress personal opinion in order to anticipate all the questions and gather all the necessary facts.
• Deal in specifics instead of generalities.
• Use simple, clear and precise language.
• Tell the difference between baloney and substance.
• Set priorities in terms of importance in order to properly organize the facts.
• Exercise judgment in pondering the hows, the whys and the “so whats” of a story.
If you grew up reading newspapers, and could ape their writing style, you taught yourself a lot of these skills. If you grow up Tweeting and texting and throwing up blurbs on Facebook, you might never learn any of it. One effect of that is you’ll lack the ability to think critically and you’ll be an easy mark for corporate and political marketing in this age of hype, infomercials, advertorials, secret sponsorships, product placements, public places named for big companies and vending machines in the schools.
I’m getting so cranky I think there may be a plot at work to achieve that effect. One little clue as an example: the media no longer refers to the Democratic Caucus in the House; it refers to the Democrat Caucus, with the word “Democrat” sort of spat in contempt when spoken. Who masterminded that weird shift in political correctness? It sure wasn’t the heirs of Strunk or White. I bet it was Karl Rove … and our noble independent media went right along with him.
Schools should be trying to counteract the aspects of our culture that degrade expository writing skills and therefore basic common-sense thinking skills. It would be a great idea for high schools to make freshmen learn how to write a good news story. It could be fun. It could save the country.
A few generations ago, people who couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything else could always find a job in the news business and do pretty well in it. All they had to know was how to think logically and how to write clearly and pretty much everybody with at least a C average, back in those days, could do both.
Need a job? Go be a reporter until you find yourself. Just maybe you’ll discover that you like the gig. If not, it will put a few dollars in your pocket and teach you how to work hard and meet deadlines while you ponder the future.
From coast to coast, in small towns and big cities, kids learned grammar and sentence structure and had to master expository writing. I remember the red ink in the margins of my early efforts: “Clarity.” “Diction.” “Grammar.” “Logic.” Seeing those words on the page meant those things were missing or problematic.
So much has changed. An education is no longer an end unto itself, a good thing to have because it will make you a better person, a better member of the community, a better citizen — a thoughtful, independent person who can express him or herself effectively.
More than ever, education now is about the fragmented national economy and finding a place in it. Getting an education is just another consumer item now, with students and their parents publicly assessing the quality of their teachers and how much bang they’re getting for their tuition or tax bucks. That makes students the judges which, in some ways, turns the academic world upside down.
Everyone’s heard the bad news about American kids lagging behind those in many other countries with their math and science skills. I don’t recall hearing much about their verbal and writing skills. But as someone who has hired many young people over the years to work as cub reporters, it’s my opinion that writing skills have been on the decline for decades.
One clue is the fact that so many job applicants submit clips from their college newspapers that are not hard news stories but music or movie reviews, opinion pieces, or personal essays. Or there might be a light feature, written in the first person and full of hyperbole, as might be expected of a barely rewritten press release.
Self-indulgence doesn’t work well in a hard news story. Is that why nobody wants to write them anymore? It has been many, many years since I’ve seen a good hard news story in a job applicant’s clips. It gives me the impression that a lot of high school and college newspapers are full of fluffy writing. That means, to me, their publications aren’t really newspapers and the students writing for them are not learning how to be journalists.
How would they know the difference? So few young people read newspapers. They don’t even watch network news, which is no longer an example of well-written, well-edited journalism anyway: stories are pretty vague and fuzzy and too full of unanswered questions. But it’s about as close as mass culture can get these days to old-fashioned news, at least in its essential form.
You may ask: So what, Mr. Grump? So what if kids are clueless about old-fashioned newspaper writing?
A person who could write a good news story, if required to do so in some gruesome spot test, knows how to:
• Think logically and critically in order to assess a topic and decide what questions need to be to asked to fully explain it from beginning to end.
• Suppress personal opinion in order to anticipate all the questions and gather all the necessary facts.
• Deal in specifics instead of generalities.
• Use simple, clear and precise language.
• Tell the difference between baloney and substance.
• Set priorities in terms of importance in order to properly organize the facts.
• Exercise judgment in pondering the hows, the whys and the “so whats” of a story.
If you grew up reading newspapers, and could ape their writing style, you taught yourself a lot of these skills. If you grow up Tweeting and texting and throwing up blurbs on Facebook, you might never learn any of it. One effect of that is you’ll lack the ability to think critically and you’ll be an easy mark for corporate and political marketing in this age of hype, infomercials, advertorials, secret sponsorships, product placements, public places named for big companies and vending machines in the schools.
I’m getting so cranky I think there may be a plot at work to achieve that effect. One little clue as an example: the media no longer refers to the Democratic Caucus in the House; it refers to the Democrat Caucus, with the word “Democrat” sort of spat in contempt when spoken. Who masterminded that weird shift in political correctness? It sure wasn’t the heirs of Strunk or White. I bet it was Karl Rove … and our noble independent media went right along with him.
Schools should be trying to counteract the aspects of our culture that degrade expository writing skills and therefore basic common-sense thinking skills. It would be a great idea for high schools to make freshmen learn how to write a good news story. It could be fun. It could save the country.
Better days in the news biz
The news business had its golden era over the first three or four decades after World II, a time when journalism acquired its badge of honor thanks to the likes of broadcasters Edward R. Murrow, Eric Severeid and Walter Cronkite, and later Morley Safer, Harry Reasoner, Dan Rather and others. There were print heroes, too, of course, men and women who made their names during World War II, Korea and, later, the Vietnam War and Watergate.
They taught Americans that journalism was a noble effort pursued by decent people seeking the truth and nothing but the truth. They weren't selling an ideology or agenda, not even for the bosses whose goal was to make money. The money was made by selling something of value: real news.
It was a radical concept in a nation where the press had always been politically biased and driven by the pursuit not of truth but profit, either political or financial or both.
The decline of the great newspapers, the corporate takeover of television newsrooms, the rise of the Internet and the need to generate content in an endless stream with a shrinking budget and staff have changed all that. Consumers of news now need to take everything with a grain of salt, as they probably did when the republic was new and all newspapers were unabashedly biased.
I still think about news the way I learned to think in the 1960s and 1970s. But now even “60 Minutes” is making me roll my eyes. Recently it profiled Hugh Jackman, sending Steve Kroft to Australia to walk with the star through the halls of his high school and behold the very stage where he first tasted the joys of performing.
I suspect everything he had to say about himself and his craft has been reported elsewhere. A few days after watching the interview, I stumbled one sleepless night upon a “Les Miserables” YouTube promo clip in which Jackman enthusiastically spewed exactly the same stuff he’d told Kroft.
Rehashed promotional fodder on “60 Minutes”? Don Hewitt, who used to pop into the newsroom at The Southampton Press when I edited it, must have been rolling in his grave. Hugh Jackman may be of particular interest if you’re “Entertainment Tonight” but if you’re “60 Minutes” why bother if there’s nothing new and fresh in the story?
This is what the business devotes its resources to these days instead of big, complicated stories about important things. They do what's easy and cheap and entertaining, so why not?
When I was a kid, CBS News put together a documentary every month for a program called “CBS Reports.” One piece, called “Harvest of Shame,” about the lives of migrant farm workers, was riveting. I saw it as a kid and again as a journalism student in 1979. Can you imagine a network spending the money to film real documentaries today? The best they do now is fill out a few interviews with re-creations and simulations and some clips. It's all re-hashed and even made-up fodder.
The disappearance of a national forum that reaches into millions of living rooms at once is celebrated today as a good thing. No longer do a few people sitting in New York decide what’s news and what isn’t and how to play the story. Okay. But who do we trust now? Nobody. It’s one reason we spend so much time spinning our wheels over ideology and myth instead of substance and fact. We live in a fantasy land.
I was very lucky to have learned the news business at a time when the old standards still applied. My boss was a newsman who had worked at the Hartford Courant and the Washington Post. By training and by nature, he was an independent, critical thinker who was fascinated by the world and how it worked. He was not a marketing man or salesman. He was not political. Stories weren’t designed to reach markets or please advertisers or to entertain the most people at the cheapest possible cost — just as our stories here at the Reporter still are not. But the Reporter is the exception to the rule, a little island of honesty in a sea of baloney.
I’m pleased to have been a part of this noble little enterprise on and off now for 13 years. I'm also pleased there are other exceptions to the rule, NPR being one. Thank you NPR for being there. Likewise New York Times. I see some signs of the insiduous influence of web-thought in you but I love you just the same and that's a topic for a whole other column.
They taught Americans that journalism was a noble effort pursued by decent people seeking the truth and nothing but the truth. They weren't selling an ideology or agenda, not even for the bosses whose goal was to make money. The money was made by selling something of value: real news.
It was a radical concept in a nation where the press had always been politically biased and driven by the pursuit not of truth but profit, either political or financial or both.
The decline of the great newspapers, the corporate takeover of television newsrooms, the rise of the Internet and the need to generate content in an endless stream with a shrinking budget and staff have changed all that. Consumers of news now need to take everything with a grain of salt, as they probably did when the republic was new and all newspapers were unabashedly biased.
I still think about news the way I learned to think in the 1960s and 1970s. But now even “60 Minutes” is making me roll my eyes. Recently it profiled Hugh Jackman, sending Steve Kroft to Australia to walk with the star through the halls of his high school and behold the very stage where he first tasted the joys of performing.
I suspect everything he had to say about himself and his craft has been reported elsewhere. A few days after watching the interview, I stumbled one sleepless night upon a “Les Miserables” YouTube promo clip in which Jackman enthusiastically spewed exactly the same stuff he’d told Kroft.
Rehashed promotional fodder on “60 Minutes”? Don Hewitt, who used to pop into the newsroom at The Southampton Press when I edited it, must have been rolling in his grave. Hugh Jackman may be of particular interest if you’re “Entertainment Tonight” but if you’re “60 Minutes” why bother if there’s nothing new and fresh in the story?
This is what the business devotes its resources to these days instead of big, complicated stories about important things. They do what's easy and cheap and entertaining, so why not?
When I was a kid, CBS News put together a documentary every month for a program called “CBS Reports.” One piece, called “Harvest of Shame,” about the lives of migrant farm workers, was riveting. I saw it as a kid and again as a journalism student in 1979. Can you imagine a network spending the money to film real documentaries today? The best they do now is fill out a few interviews with re-creations and simulations and some clips. It's all re-hashed and even made-up fodder.
The disappearance of a national forum that reaches into millions of living rooms at once is celebrated today as a good thing. No longer do a few people sitting in New York decide what’s news and what isn’t and how to play the story. Okay. But who do we trust now? Nobody. It’s one reason we spend so much time spinning our wheels over ideology and myth instead of substance and fact. We live in a fantasy land.
I was very lucky to have learned the news business at a time when the old standards still applied. My boss was a newsman who had worked at the Hartford Courant and the Washington Post. By training and by nature, he was an independent, critical thinker who was fascinated by the world and how it worked. He was not a marketing man or salesman. He was not political. Stories weren’t designed to reach markets or please advertisers or to entertain the most people at the cheapest possible cost — just as our stories here at the Reporter still are not. But the Reporter is the exception to the rule, a little island of honesty in a sea of baloney.
I’m pleased to have been a part of this noble little enterprise on and off now for 13 years. I'm also pleased there are other exceptions to the rule, NPR being one. Thank you NPR for being there. Likewise New York Times. I see some signs of the insiduous influence of web-thought in you but I love you just the same and that's a topic for a whole other column.
Inside Out: a not-so-smalltown editor's life
Bits and pieces from my newspaper column as well as some riffs on the horrors of novel writing and trying to get one's work the attention it deserves.
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