To boldly go where no reader has gone before

Michael Lewis (By Justin Hoch at http://www.jhoch.com)

If we’re going to Save Journalism, it will be helpful to figure out exactly what we’re trying to save. I was reminded of one of the key elements when listening to a recent episode of “This American Life.” Michael Lewis reported on …

a man named Emir Kamenica, whose path to college started with fleeing the war in Bosnia and becoming a refugee in the United States. Then he had a stroke of luck: a student teacher read an essay he’d plagiarized from a book he’d stolen from a library back in Bosnia, and was so impressed that she got him out of a bad high school and into a much better one. He went on to Harvard and great success. Years later, he tracks down the student teacher to thank her, only to find that she remembers the story differently.

The story is interesting in itself and very well structured, but, then, “This American Life” and Michael Lewis — how could it be otherwise? It’s a long piece — 34 minutes — but you will not regret devoting so much time to it. (Can’t play the embedded version above? Here’s the link: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/504/how-i-got-into-college?act=2

The summary above is from the TAL website, and it contains a significant error. According to the person writing the summary, the story’s subject, Emir Kamenica “tracks down the student teacher to thank her.” Not according to what Lewis says in the report. It was TAL that hired a private investigation agency, the wonderfully named Serving by Irving (“If they’re alive, we’ll serve them. If they’re dead, we’ll tell you where they’re buried”), to find the teacher. Kamenica had told the story about his teacher for ages, but his efforts to find her were, as Lewis says, “half-assed” and got nowhere.

The moment when Lewis says “Since Emir wasn’t going to hire [a detective], ‘This American Life’ did it for him” — that’s journalism in a nutshell.

An essential part of what makes journalism something special — something worth saving — is that it goes after information the average reader could not or would not. This is why readers like “behind the scenes” reporting. When a small fire led to the temporary shutdown of Cleveland’s West Side Market, a hundred-year-old public marketplace, Plain Dealer photographer Marvin Fong found a way to get a shot of the damage even though the market was closed off. While repair work was underway, the paper arranged for photographer Lisa DeJong to get inside and show readers what was happening. This is journalism: Going where the reader otherwise could not. This is also journalism: taking the time they would not, taking the risks they dare not. Barlett and Steele devoting months to sifting and analyzing data. Reporters embedded with front-line troops.

Sounds obvious, perhaps? But we fail at it. More times than I like to recall, I would ask a reporter about something I didn’t understand in a story, only to be told “that’s what it said in the press release.” Or I’d ask about a missing fact and be told “the PR person didn’t get back to me.” “That wasn’t in the police report.” “There was no phone number listed in the filing.” These weren’t incompetent journalists. They were quite capable of digging deep for stories, and did so again and again. So why did they not bother to make an extra call, to find another way to get at key information, to go beyond an official statement?

Because the stories weren’t a Big Deal.  Company A sued Company B, but I’m only going to write a brief about it, so no need to track down a response from Company B.

Because reporters were limited by their knowledge. Developer X proposes a project but I didn’t check the archive for previous proposals because the developer didn’t mention any and they were before my time.

Because they didn’t trust their judgment. “Yeah,” said one of my ace reporters about a missing fact, “I wondered if you’d notice that.” He said this several times over the course of our work together, and each time I rolled my eyes. Knowing him, it wasn’t that he was too lazy, but that he was deferring a decision to downstream editors.

Because they ran out of time. (We can argue about whether an individual reporter ran out of time because he had too much to do or because he wasted time, but the struggle between “get it complete” and “publish now” only gets worse with 24-7 online news.)

I’ve come to think the core problem of daily journalism is that the deadline doesn’t care if you understand the story. — Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 5, 2013

Because they didn’t like the task. This is when a reporter would say that finding or verifying a fact would require an unusual effort: putting together a database, making several phones calls, going door to door to find witnesses. Each reporter would have his or her own limits. For me, I think it was cold calls. After a few hang-ups or just dead ends, I found it easy to persuade myself that there was no point in going on.

Because the facts weren’t online. Even reporters who started out before the web can get so used to looking everything up online that they begin and end their searches there.

One of the reasons reporters need editors is to be reminded that reporting is more than passing on neat stuff you heard. If all you provide is the information Joe Reader could have gotten from the news release, you’re just an unneeded middle man. The most valuable part of what we do is to make the extra effort that an average reader would not.

With all the information available online now, that bar’s been raised. I winced every time I’d see readers in the comments bringing up facts about a story that we hadn’t provided because the reporter hadn’t even thought to use Google. And that would only have gotten us up to the level of the average reader. If what we do is worth saving, it must go further.

Simple rule: For every story, ask yourself what you did to report it that an average reader couldn’t.