When Losers Write History: Why...media reporters get their own industry so wrong

Good idea to ask first.

It was sarcasm, yes.

Bottom line: readers decide. Why should they care if local city council coverage comes from a "JOURNALIST!!!!" as opposed to a local resident who enjoys going to these things (yes, they do exist), takes notes, and blogs about it?

The dirty little secret about what the average print journalist does is that it's not especially difficult. Oh, sure, some writers are more talented than others, and some reporters are more determined and/or have a better grasp of how to read databases or cultivate human sources.

But the basic stuff, the high school football and city council meetings? The local coverage many feel will stake newspapers' survival?

Child's play for an intelligent - and OK, somewhat motivated - individual with a good grasp of grammar. And there are plenty of those people who never had to learn how to write a "punchy" lead, followed by a "compelling" nut graph.

 

I agree with you, Piotr. My point wasn't that we should remind readers why we're important. We need to remind ourselves that we can be important, figure out why we can be important, then do more of that so that readers choose our product.

 

I just keep hoping some Chicago beat writers read this thread and someone for the love of god asks Hoyer how hard they have Concepcion throwing.

 

My experience tells me quality journalism is expensive. My reservation is not that non-professionals can't write or can't string together basic facts. It's that being consistently accurate and consistently fair almost always requires having colleagues looking over your shoulder, and that kind of pre-publication scrutiny is not affordable to non-professionals, even if they recognized the need for it.

My newspaper makes its share of mistakes, but at least we spend millions of dollars on layers of editing that try to ensure those don't happen. We also have layers of management that can hear out people who believe they are being treated unfairly by a reporter. If the mistake is bad enough, we also can afford to reassign or fire the people responsible.

On the flip side, we can afford to pursue legally dangerous stories because we can afford to have lawyers look at them before we run them and defend us after we run them. We can, just on principal, afford to lose an advertiser who is upset about a story. We can, as my newspaper recently did, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to legally coerce a government entity to release documents.

Sure, we can come up with an occasional exception, but consistently aggressive, honest journalism is generally not going to be a product of a cottage industry because it's way too expensive. Even the local websites in my area that are produced by people with decades of newspaper experience suffer from being the product of one person's limited vision rather than the collaborative effort of a large, diverse staff. And they can't and won't take the economic risks that we take.

And I don't believe there's any harm in us reminding readers why this is the case. If they can't understand that money is a factor in quality control, they are really too stupid to be reading us in the first place.

 

No disagreements about the power of lawyers and all that entails. But I think papers have been missing what's out there on other side of the cost spectrum.

Thinking only about baseball coverage (which is where this started), I would be very careful about touting editorial superiority. Not until reporters and editors become well-versed with freely available tools that allow readers to fact-check stories quickly and easily.

Here's an example from Monday. In this Bill Dwyre column in the LA Times about Maury Wills, he quotes Wills saying, "I'm pretty sure I played every inning" of a 165-game season, and the column leaves it there as fact.

A quick check of B-Ref for the 1962 Dodgers shows that Wills played in 165 games, but only 152 complete games. He sat for about five games' worth of innings combined. It didn't take a group effort to discover this. It was detected by the very first comment on the Baseball Think Factory thread about it.

Wills' quote sounds great, and it'd be nice to have. But it's not correct, and not really that close (Steve Garvey played more innings over 162 games in 1980). Wills even tips it off by saying "pretty sure." It could have been cut out with no harm done to the story, but it wasn't checked.

It might be nitpicking, but editors pick nits. And there are other errors that pop up routinely -- not just basic/advanced stats, but service time, contracts, arb years -- that could be easily avoided by cross-checking them against free, reputable sites. The dumb readers may never understand, but the smart readers can be steps ahead of the professional with no inside knowledge, just because the professionals haven't taken the time to know how to use what's out there.

So before I remind readers that I'm presenting an edge in production, I'd make sure that I'm as up to date on relevant tools as my smart readers are. Too many reporters/staffs haven't kept up, and amateurs have been able to take advantage of that.

 

Look, on some newspapers we could and did check such facts as a matter of copy desk routine as far back as the 1980s (I know because I remember being taught, and not very gently, how to do it). It has nothing to do with online tools or this being a different era. They just missed it.

 

About the comment that doing high school sports and council meetings are not that hard.

Often, the stories aren't hard. The hard part is doing it to meet a deadline. That is where the professional part of it comes in.

The other thing is that most people can't write to fit a certain size. Every attorney thinks they are a great writer. Most of them aren't.

 

Respectfully disagree. At many old-world newspapers that never would have thought of doing such a thing, fact-checking has been deemed a luxury that's nice to do when time allows. And then time never allows. I agree that mistakes get magnified these days as "Why Newspapers Are Dying" when mistakes have always existed, but there's a whole important step that has been efficiencied out of the operation. It's as likely that they never saw it as it is that they didn't catch it.

 

Well, I have no firsthand knowledge of how they do it at the LAT. But I can say absolutely that you still can do it in 2012. The place that slapped it into me, in what most people would consider the Fat Old Days, remains the busiest desk I've worked on. I thought it was completely insane at the time, but they taught me how to do it and do it fast. And there always has been a tradeoff -- I could be better at other tasks if I were willing to sacrifice the fact-checking. But I believe it's the most important task. I still do the anal-retentive shit like check the phone numbers we publish when I believe the rim editor was unlikely to have done it himself. To use your word, I have "efficiencied" out other stuff and kept that. For example, I do not tighten copy nearly as much as I used to, nor do I change all the cliches anymore. I decided what I believe to be most important, and accuracy is atop my list. To me it is the difference between a good Class AAA hitter and a major-league hitter -- being able to hit a curveball. So, yeah, I have to believe that someone editing Dwyre's column should have caught it.

 

I think I owe you an apology then. In my defense, as was said by others, some people do indeed throw those lines around. Still -- my bad.

[quote author=Frank_Ridgeway]
My experience tells me quality journalism is expensive. My reservation is not that non-professionals can't write or can't string together basic facts. It's that being consistently accurate and consistently fair almost always requires having colleagues looking over your shoulder, and that kind of pre-publication scrutiny is not affordable to non-professionals, even if they recognized the need for it.

My newspaper makes its share of mistakes, but at least we spend millions of dollars on layers of editing that try to ensure those don't happen. We also have layers of management that can hear out people who believe they are being treated unfairly by a reporter. If the mistake is bad enough, we also can afford to reassign or fire the people responsible.

On the flip side, we can afford to pursue legally dangerous stories because we can afford to have lawyers look at them before we run them and defend us after we run them. We can, just on principal, afford to lose an advertiser who is upset about a story. We can, as my newspaper recently did, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to legally coerce a government entity to release documents.
[/quote]

Yes, yes, a million times, yes. Everyone can use an editor. Some of us could use lawyers.

Definitely not. I've seen several journalists go to law school, and the first thing they do is beat all the good writing habits out of them. Legal style is completely different. It's OK to repeat yourself and belabor points.

And I've had to read plenty of legal documents for stories I've covered. If you care about good writing, they're nauseating.

Sometimes, you find a rare talent who can go back and forth between writing for court and writing for general consumption. Emphasis: Rare.

 

At this critical point in the media ecology, it's more essential than ever for newspapers to remind the public why they exist -- and what society would lose if newspapers went away. Yes, you'd better practice what you preach, but in this era of short attention spans and a dearth of critical thinking skills, it doesn't hurt to toot your own horn every now and then, either.

Often would be better.

Newspapers are terrible at promoting the role they play in a democracy. They've apparently adopted the same marketing strategy as the Broccoli Growers of America, believing people will consume simply because it's the right thing to do -- completely ignoring the fact that, left to their own devices, most people will go for Whoppers and Quarter Pounders every time.

The newspaper industry needs to do a better job of making the case to the public why it's still essential. If consumers don't buy in, then, well, it's their fault. Right now, the industry carries much of the blame.

 

Yes, yes, a million times, yes. Everyone can use an editor. Some of us could use lawyers.

Definitely not. I've seen several journalists go to law school, and the first thing they do is beat all the good writing habits out of them. Legal style is completely different. It's OK to repeat yourself and belabor points.

And I've had to read plenty of legal documents for stories I've covered. If you care about good writing, they're nauseating.

Sometimes, you find a rare talent who can go back and forth between writing for court and writing for general consumption. Emphasis: Rare.
[/quote]

Legal documents don't need to be poorly written because of "legal style"--many lawyers are simply bad writers. Law schools emphasize "good" writing in writing classes, but that's a small portion of the curriculum. Instead, you spend most of your time reading poorly written opinions--it can corrupt your mind via osmosis. The best legal writers detest "legalese" and share many qualities with the best writers in other fields. Like everything else, though, only a few people can be the "best". Reading the opinions of people like Justices Scalia*, Kagan*, and (former Justice) Stevens can be delightful; the opinions of Justices Souter and Kennedy can be a task.

* Although, to be fair, it's much easier to write a stylish dissent because you don't need to gain the approval of four other justices or worry about setting precedent--you get to attack.