As I am looking for my next job and trying to decide what to do with the rest of my professional life, I've gotten a few suggestions from friends and family. With more than 30 years of experience in community journalism, some have suggested that I consider teaching, perhaps a class on the community college level.
I suppose I'm sort of a dinosaur in the news business. I filed my first stories using a Royal manual typewriter. Computer typesetting was still a few years off. The internet wasn't even a gleam in the eye of more than perhaps a few computer geeks somewhere. We had no way of knowing back then that one day we would be a mere click of the TV remote or a couple of keystrokes away from instant news, 24 hours a day.
Most of the improvements in how we gather, produce and obtain the news has been great. But if I were ever to present a lecture to a class of future journalists, my first observation would be that in this era of instant news and our need for new things every minute, one of the basic laws of good journalism has been put on the shelf.
The first day of almost any journalism class, regardless of whether it is at the college, high school or even junior high level, the teacher walks to the board and writes the following words: “Who, What, When, Where, Why and How.” It is and always has been the basic law of any complete news story. All six of those questions must be answered. But it is my fear that in this era of filling the 24-hour news cycle with something new and different all the time, when the style of shorter stories was first introduced by the USA Today newspaper, those questions are not always answered. Trouble is, we are bombarded by so many stories in any given hour of TV news or issue of a daily newspaper, few of us realize what we are missing until it is long gone.
A few days ago, the local TV news showed an explosion of a natural gas pipeline in a city. There was a death and a few injuries in the mishap. As the local newsman was narrating the spectacular film footage, he forgot one main fact. He never said where the explosion was. Luckily, a scroll across the bottom of the screen told us the explosion happened in Philadelphia and not downtown Davenport. But the point is, the narrator should have told us!
In my old age, I've grown less tolerant of lazy journalism. Poor judgment is a big part of this trend. In their desire to keep the interest of the viewer, news directors send crews to the scenes of fires and traffic accidents all the time. Most of the time, the crews present some good footage. But sometimes, what we see from an accident scene are precious seconds of views of squad cars ambulances and street signs. Sometimes there is very little coverage of the mangled vehicles.
With the advice of my bosses, early on in my career I started covering personal injury accidents. But we had an unwritten rule that we would not photograph victims, unless it was a shot from far away as crews were loading somebody in an ambulance. But I always made sure I had pictures of the cars involved and sometimes, even shot pictures of skid marks, in case law enforcement needed them in their investigation. If I was a TV assignment editor and my crew came back without any shots of the wrecked vehicles, it would be a long time before that crew got any more prime assignments.
And how often have we heard accident or crime reports where police withhold the names of victims or suspects? Since when did reporters lose their sense of curiosity? The police chiefs I dealt with over the years were very cooperative. But they knew that if they didn't tell me the names of people involved in incidents, they would have to have a good reason why not. They also knew that I had a long memory and would be asking them for the names the next time we met. As one editor once told me, “The only dumb question is the one not asked.”
Another strange thing local TV does is how it covers winter weather. I have lost count of the number of times our local stations have sent out some poor young reporter to a street somewhere and had them stand there, providing three or more live reports in a half-hour newscast of snow coming down. Hey folks, news flash: It's Iowa! It snows in the winter! File one brief report from the scene of the first snowflake in any given storm and then let those poor reporters come in from the cold. Enough already!
In any news operation, print or electronic, resources are a constant concern. After more than 30 years of relying on TV news from the Waterloo-Cedar Rapids market, it's natural for me to compare how it is done there compared to the Quad-Cities stations. When Iowa and Iowa State played in postseason bowl football games, at least in past years, all three TV stations in Waterloo and Cedar Rapids would send reporters to cover the teams for several days leading up to the games. This past season, there was little of that from the Quad-Cities stations.
Living on the border with Illinois, I've had to become adjusted to seeing University of Illinois coverage and learning the names of more small town Illinois schools than I could ever want.
We all have to learn to adapt to changing circumstances. But we should never let our busy lives keep us from expecting complete news stories. If you have a question about a story after you hear it or see it, call the news department and ask for more information. Maybe if more of us took the time to do that, today's newspaper and electronic media reporters would become more responsible.
No comments:
Post a Comment