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textualdevianceA good night's sleep does wonders.
Now, the rantage I mentioned...
One of the things that bewildered me about my stories being cut was the notion of having to have three live sources to do a movie preview.
Uh. Okay. Feel free to pay for my trip to a press junket, then. And then I can sit in a stuffy hotel room with George Clooney and his small army of publicists and get five minutes to ask the same stupid questions that the last 70 hacks have asked, the answers to which could be easily divined by simply doing a bit of homework.
That's not journalism.
There is very little that a live source can give in cases like that that you're not going to find elsewhere. Journalists are supposed to do their homework before they do a story anyway. If you over-rely on interviews to do that homework for you, frankly, that's just laziness. We have this wonderful new-fangled innerweb thingy which has a wealth of information right at your fingertips. So you get assigned a story, you look up what's already been written about it, and what the hard data of it is, and then, if there are questions that come up that don't get answered by your research, you go pester a live human being to fill in the blanks. There is NOTHING that will irritate an interviewee more than a reporter who hasn't done their homework, and wastes their time asking stupid questions.
When I was doing BEI, etc., I was always combing for new interviews. I still have newsalerts set for some of the stuff. And what I found was that there were, at times, literally dozens of stories which all gave the exact same set of data, including quotes. The writer didn't bother mentioning that they were at a press conference, they didn't bother mentioning that they were at a junket and had five minutes. And in the video footage from some of those, you can tell how pissed off the actor in question is about being asked the same inane questions for several hours in a row.
How is that journalism? How is that reporting? I got dinged on one of my stories because I was "regurgitating" information which had already been printed. (Uh, no, but that's a longer story.) What I want to know is: how is taking tons of information from several different legitimate non-live sources and synthesizing them into a single, concise article regurgitation while sitting at a press conference and writing up the exact same quote that the other 40 people in the room are going to write up is NOT regurgitation? And for that matter, how is it not regurgitation to be too lazy to get data before you do an interview, and get a quote from a live source saying the EXACT same thing you would've found had you done the research yourself?
We live in an age of incredibly media-savvy and up-to-date information consumers. In this climate, where readers are even writing the news themselves, you can't get away with passing off interviews as reporting when they say the same things your readers already know.
There are two functions for journalists in this climate:
1. Be a human RSS feed. Take a bunch of information from different sources, cut it down, re-shape it for your audience, and put it together in a single, neat package that's easily digestible. You do this so you save your readers the time and energy of having to go out and do all that research themselves.
2. Be an investigator and analyst. This is where real journalism comes in. You do the same thing that you do with the RSS feed, but you put the information together in a way that gives an angle or analysis of the information which is new and different than a reader would've been able to divine for themselves. This is the sort of thing that wins Pulitzers.
Sticking a microphone in someone's face and asking them ridiculous questions is not journalism. Absolutely, interviews are necessary to the trade, and there will always be times when you get stuff out of those that you're not going to get anywhere else. There will also always be times when there is NO existing data to go from, and you have to do an interview to get anything at all. Breaking news is one of those things. Car accident? You have to go bug the police and witnesses.
But IMHO, there's absolutely no point in wasting some poor slob's time to ask them questions that you could've already answered by looking up the data in the first place. And when your research answers all the reasonable questions your audience would want, there's no point in duplicating that effort just to say you've talked to a live human being.
The point of journalism should be to get accurate, useful information, package it, and deliver it to a mass audience. Whether that accurate information comes from a live interview or from already-printed data shouldn't matter. A live source rule makes sense for breaking news stories. It doesn't make sense for every story.
Now, the rantage I mentioned...
One of the things that bewildered me about my stories being cut was the notion of having to have three live sources to do a movie preview.
Uh. Okay. Feel free to pay for my trip to a press junket, then. And then I can sit in a stuffy hotel room with George Clooney and his small army of publicists and get five minutes to ask the same stupid questions that the last 70 hacks have asked, the answers to which could be easily divined by simply doing a bit of homework.
That's not journalism.
There is very little that a live source can give in cases like that that you're not going to find elsewhere. Journalists are supposed to do their homework before they do a story anyway. If you over-rely on interviews to do that homework for you, frankly, that's just laziness. We have this wonderful new-fangled innerweb thingy which has a wealth of information right at your fingertips. So you get assigned a story, you look up what's already been written about it, and what the hard data of it is, and then, if there are questions that come up that don't get answered by your research, you go pester a live human being to fill in the blanks. There is NOTHING that will irritate an interviewee more than a reporter who hasn't done their homework, and wastes their time asking stupid questions.
When I was doing BEI, etc., I was always combing for new interviews. I still have newsalerts set for some of the stuff. And what I found was that there were, at times, literally dozens of stories which all gave the exact same set of data, including quotes. The writer didn't bother mentioning that they were at a press conference, they didn't bother mentioning that they were at a junket and had five minutes. And in the video footage from some of those, you can tell how pissed off the actor in question is about being asked the same inane questions for several hours in a row.
How is that journalism? How is that reporting? I got dinged on one of my stories because I was "regurgitating" information which had already been printed. (Uh, no, but that's a longer story.) What I want to know is: how is taking tons of information from several different legitimate non-live sources and synthesizing them into a single, concise article regurgitation while sitting at a press conference and writing up the exact same quote that the other 40 people in the room are going to write up is NOT regurgitation? And for that matter, how is it not regurgitation to be too lazy to get data before you do an interview, and get a quote from a live source saying the EXACT same thing you would've found had you done the research yourself?
We live in an age of incredibly media-savvy and up-to-date information consumers. In this climate, where readers are even writing the news themselves, you can't get away with passing off interviews as reporting when they say the same things your readers already know.
There are two functions for journalists in this climate:
1. Be a human RSS feed. Take a bunch of information from different sources, cut it down, re-shape it for your audience, and put it together in a single, neat package that's easily digestible. You do this so you save your readers the time and energy of having to go out and do all that research themselves.
2. Be an investigator and analyst. This is where real journalism comes in. You do the same thing that you do with the RSS feed, but you put the information together in a way that gives an angle or analysis of the information which is new and different than a reader would've been able to divine for themselves. This is the sort of thing that wins Pulitzers.
Sticking a microphone in someone's face and asking them ridiculous questions is not journalism. Absolutely, interviews are necessary to the trade, and there will always be times when you get stuff out of those that you're not going to get anywhere else. There will also always be times when there is NO existing data to go from, and you have to do an interview to get anything at all. Breaking news is one of those things. Car accident? You have to go bug the police and witnesses.
But IMHO, there's absolutely no point in wasting some poor slob's time to ask them questions that you could've already answered by looking up the data in the first place. And when your research answers all the reasonable questions your audience would want, there's no point in duplicating that effort just to say you've talked to a live human being.
The point of journalism should be to get accurate, useful information, package it, and deliver it to a mass audience. Whether that accurate information comes from a live interview or from already-printed data shouldn't matter. A live source rule makes sense for breaking news stories. It doesn't make sense for every story.
