Nobody expects the general public to know how the news media works; it isn’t taught in school. But sometimes it is astonishing to realize how little even the professionals understand, or forget, about the craft.
Writing in The San Diego Union-Tribune last week, reader’s representative Carol Goodhue expressed awed surprise at the success of The U-T’s online news team. Not only that, other big-city news organizations were awed, too, by the U-T’s success, she said, including Washingtonpost.com, who called with questions.
She wrote: “The actual query may be ‘How does it work?’ but I think the unspoken one is ‘How do so few do so much so quickly?’ ”
An astonishing statement to have been made, by a journalist, about journalists, and journalism.
But sort of understandable. For 500 years, newspapers journalists had 24 hours to work with in any given news cycle, and it was unthinkable to expect them to do more. Morning papers had their staffs, and evening papers had their staffs. With all that time, it was reasonable that newspaper guys would forget exactly how fast journalism is designed to work.
Until a big story broke. In 1978, a mid-air collision of airplanes over a San Diego neighborhood killed 144 people, in the planes and on the ground. It happened at 9 in the morning. By shortly after noon, the Evening Tribune, San Diego’s former evening newspaper, was on the streets with a first edition that would win a Pulitzer Prize for spot reporting.
That’s how fast journalism is designed to work. We felt it also on the Union side that morning. There was an instant shifting of gears, in which the Union newsroom accelerated from a normal workaday pace to a speed of 150 miles per hour. This happened with no one having to be told, or reminded, what to do. We just started covering the crash story. We were trained for this. We had the tools of the trade, and we simply responded, as smoothly as musicians dusting off instruments and sitting down to play.
Music provides a useful parallel. The general public listens to music every day without the slightest idea of how the music is made, the same way people read news media with no awareness at all of the process. With the dawn of online newspaper teams and their deadlines every minute, citizens have unprecedented opportunity to encounter the news actually being covered, and reporters have the same opportunity to encounter standard public reaction to news people. The public likes to accuse the news media of arrogance in claiming to know what the news is. Encountering this, the online news teams can provide on-the-spot education, to the benefit of both parties. U-T online reporter Greg Gross said people "have an image of us as imperious and arrogant, and when they find out we’re human beings just like they are, it’s a shock.” The only difference between them is that the news people human beings have been to journalism school.
To journalists now working for online news teams – the U-T’s was created in May, 2005 – it must be like a really cool rediscovery of their natural speed, and how easy it is to do journalism at 150 mph. Said Goodhue: “They don’t wait for assignments or debate whether to head out for a promising story. Karen Kucher, one of the original members of the team, and an assistant editor, said, ‘Our default is supposed to be go. . . When something big happens, it’s amazing how everybody just sort of figures out how to cover the news. It’s seamless.’ ”
It always was. Television news types in the last 30 years have claimed speed as their territory, where in reality there is not the slightest distinction to be made, for speed getting the job done, between a newspaper journalist, and a broadcast journalist. The tools are the same, on both sides of the aisle.
This blog has been cross-posted to The Moderate Voice.
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