The next time you read a story in the newspaper, look at the reporter's name, called the byline, at the top of the story. Let's say the reporter's name is Tracy Clark.
Tracy Clark considers you a best friend. In fact, you are the reporter's hero. Reporters have been taught to think of readers that way since their first semester of journalism school. Tracy is now a veteran reporter with 20 years of experience, and this morning he has a new story for you. He has been thinking about you since he started work on this story. Now, here he is, running toward you, somewhat out of breath, his eyes excited, lines of sweat on his cheeks. The more exciting the story, the more excited he is.
"Guess what!" he says. "What?!" you ask.
And then he tells you what happened. He gives you the first sentence of the story: who won a baseball game, a city council vote, a far-off devastating earthquake, a good (or bad) day on Wall Street, a medical discovery, an investigative story on lobbyists.
"No kidding!" you say, and then you ask your friend Tracy a question. The question is the first thing you want to know about the story, the most important first information you need that will explain what happened.
Tracy will answer. His response is the second paragraph in the story. Knowing that answer, you ask the next-most important question in your mind. He answers that; it is his third paragraph in the story. And so it goes: your questions, his answers, in your logical order of interest, until you have no more questions about the story.
That is the relationship, precisely, between a reader and a reporter. Unless it is a scheduled event (a stadium, a rally, a royal marriage), the reader has very little chance of experiencing the news first-hand, say, in an entourage following a president on a trip to Cairo. The growth of television and global communications, symbolized so dramatically by CNN, sometimes empowers readers to witness distant news as it is happening: 9/11, the "shock and awe" attacks in Iraq, a shuttle disaster, a Katrina, a Super Bowl, the World Series. Because of their onboard reaction package, humans are eager consumers of news happening before their eyes. The famous "white Bronco" slow-speed pursuit of O.J. Simpson along Los Angeles freeways drew 90 million viewers, a Super Bowl-sized number.
But most news, even big news, happens away from the reader's view. And so the reader says to Tracy Clark, "Go get me the news," and hands over his reaction package, the ancient definitions and values of news that constitute the heart of the media code. Of course the reader remains blithely unaware of the transaction. Do you see the totality of the irony? In the media literacy gap in America, the media code is a secret hiding in plain sight. That may be in part because reported news looks so different from news as it is happening. It is also in part because the public is reluctant to admit its attraction to media displays of conflict, disaster, prominence, novelty, sex, sensationalism and curiosity. And demographics play a part, when specific groups with specific interests take exception to how editors democratize the news on any given day (see "What is News?").
Meanwhile, the Tracy Clarks have the tools necessary to complete their tasks, both in the field as they collect information for the story, and at their computers, as they analyze all that information, assimilate it into clear thinking, and then organize it into a story. Tracy uses a media code toolbox similar to the "reaction package," but including other tools essential to his craft.
Throughout the reporter's work with the toolbox, the reader remains his hero. Tracy, doing the work, is constantly aware of the reader looking over his shoulder. The reader has priorities. The first is accuracy. Thus accuracy, though it is an impossible goal, becomes the cardinal rule of journalism. Tracy has made mistakes in his 20-year career, and he remembers them more clearly than all the good stuff he has done, because accuracy is a matter of credibility. His workable goal is to minimize mistakes, of fact, of spelling, of grammar, of punctuation. He hasn't made many. His rule: when in doubt, check it out.
The reader's second priority is complete, objective content. Tracy must provide answers to all the questions the reader may have about the story. When he feels the story is finished, from both sides, Tracy will actually ask himself: "Will the reader have any questions about this story that I have left unanswered?" If Tracy's answer to that question is, "No," then the story is finished. If the answer is, "Yes," Tracy has some more work to do. Remember the guess-what scenario; Tracy will keep answering until you have no more questions about the story.
In many stories, all the questions can't be answered, because Tracy can't get them. Reporters must attribute all information to authorities or sources; the reader should never be under the impression that the information is coming from the reporter, unless it is a first-hand account such as a reporter covering a baseball game (and even then, only the players and managers can answer some questions). Routinely, authorities can't provide answers, usually concerning the fifth W: Why? Why did the Air France plane crash? When those answers are known, Tracy will write a new story.
When he feels that he has all the answers, Tracy will have a few pages of notes or tapes, if it is a simple story, or many pages, with other documents, if it is a big, complex story, that he must organize into files before he even thinks of writing the story. Imagine the files compiled by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post in their series of stories about Watergate that resulted in the resignation from office of a sitting United States president. Imagine the files accumulated in answering the Why of 9/11. Throughout, Tracy has relied on the media code to guide his search. Remember, he is your proxy when he asks authorities for the answers he needs to bring you the story.
When Tracy's reporting work is complete – well, let's pause for a clarification. "Reporting" actually means collecting information. When that work is completed, the reporter sits down to write the story. Most of the time, stories are written on deadline. The simplest expression of deadlines is to picture the reporter in Abilene, Texas, a city of about 100,000 population, covering a Friday night football game for The Reporter-News. The paper prints only one edition, and Tracy's deadline is 11:30 p.m. (At large metropolitan newspapers, there will be later deadlines, as many as five or six, depending on the number of editions printed, and before the night is done, depending on when the game ends, Tracy may have written six versions of the story.)
In Abilene, the game ends at 10:15. Tracy leaves the pressbox, sprints down the stadium steps to the locker rooms for some quotes he knows you will want, and by 10:45 is back in the pressbox. He has 45 minutes to finish and file his story. In front of him are pages of notes and scribbled quotes. These he will analyze, assimilate, and organize, and write the story, which typically run 750-1,000 words for a high school football game in Texas.
At no other moment in the process is the media code more essential than in these next 45 minutes. The values and definitions, and other codes, de-mystify his task, no matter if the story is a football game, a Senate debate, or a hotel fire. He scans the information, looking for news. What is news? It's in the code: anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo. He finds four bites of information that satisfy the definition. In the trade, these are called "features." A feature is the news; it is what the story is about. The rest of the information is details, and details explain features.
Next, Tracy determines: what kind of story is it? He makes the determination using the 5 W's and the 12 event values, scoring each in the story on their individual strength scale of 1-10. (Next time you read a football game story, score it yourself for the presence of the 12 values. Hint: proximity will score high if your team wins, and low if it loses.) As soon as this step is finished, Tracy can start, in his head, working on the lede. At this moment, with 35 minutes left, Tracy is furiously multi-tasking. He is working on the lede, he is grouping together features with the details that explain them, he is editing details, and he is starting to arrange the features and details into logical order.
The lede, a spelling of "lead" unique to journalism, is the first paragraph of the story, one clear and hopefully provocative sentence that tells the reader what the story is about. It is Tracy's "Guess what!" line. Editing details is a process of choosing the details that must be in the story (to answer all the reader's questions) and which details can be left out. Logical order is arranging the features and details in logical order of importance, from most important – the lede – to auxiliary details in the last paragraphs that may not even make it into the paper. Who tells Tracy, there in the pressbox, working at 110 miles per hour, what logical order is? You do.
This design of lede, edited details and logical order, is the famous inverted pyramid. Unlike the values and definitions, the pyramid did not originate with the public, but it exists today because the public approved it. The media actually created the inverted pyramid and introduced it into the media code at the time of the Civil War, 1861-65. Reporters had available a new technology, the telegraph, to send their stories back to their newspapers from the battlefields. Instead of days or weeks in the pouches of couriers, stories could be telegraphed to appear in newspapers overnight. This new speed was one of the four true revolutions in media history.
But there was a catch. Civil War correspondents wrote their stories in the only composition style they knew: the ages-old narrative, story-telling style typified today by novels, TV dramas, and movies. This design presented information in chronological order, and included many details for interest. The story developed slowly, to create drama, and the climax was at the end. Readers of the day had no cause to object to these 2,000-3,000-word stories.
The problem was access. In the 19th century, operating a mobile telegraph in wartime presented considerable logistics problems. Reporters found themselves lining up to use the same machine. Sending a narrative-style story required considerable time, and the line of reporters waiting their turn outside grew combative. Before long, the military officer in charge of the telegraph was agreeing to limit time on the machine and kicking the reporter out. "But," cried The New York Times, "I'm not even halfway through! I haven't told them who won yet!" Out he went, anyway, and in came the next reporter.
Under the circumstances, the reporters learned very quickly to flip their stories over – thus, the inverted pyramid – put the climax first, edit details to save transmission time, and send the story in logical order, so that nothing in the story after the officer cut it off was more important than any information that came before. In 1865, the Civil War ended, and reporters had no more need for the inverted pyramid. But it survived, and survives today, for one reason only: the reader liked it. It made the reader an editor. He could still read the whole, now condensed, story. But, in time, the reader learned that he or she didn't have to read the entire story to get the news. He could read five paragraphs, or seven, know he had the story's most important facts, and go to the next story. This is the way millions of Americans read the newspaper every morning.
When Tracy finishes his story at 11:29.50, and sends it, the story will pass under two and perhaps three sets of eyes before it is set into the page: the sports editor (or assistant editor working nights) and copy editors. These worthies edit the story with you-know-who in mind (when I edit, I actually imagine myself at home, reading the story in the newspaper). Copy editors, by the way, write the story's headline. Reporters DO NOT write headlines.
I need to acknowledge that what you have just read is an account of the media code's role in classic journalism since the mid-nineteenth century. More than 140 years later, the media code remains the heart of journalism. Journalism's body, however has changed radically. Television news has required reporters to condense stories to fit an average broadcast delivery speed of 140 words per minute, at a price of loss of story content and depth. Starting in the 1970s, television's evening news programs, both national and local, essentially killed the circulation, and eventually the existence of, evening newspapers. Business aspects, particularly corporate ownership, have exerted dangerous cost-cutting and political pressure on objective news operations. Internet news and information operations, with 24/7 deadlines, ridiculously low overhead, and a revolutionary business model, prompt media analysts to portray traditional news organizations – newspapers, certainly, but also television news – as dinosaurs lumbering toward the final abyss.
The traditional organizations are scrambling and struggling to adapt the Internet model, and those struggles are outside the scope of this Media Literacy series, except when journalism's 21st-century body seeks to reject the heart. Many online versions of newspapers and several all-online operations such as The Huffington Post, invite – nay, encourage – the participation of what they call "citizen journalists." Unless these participants are at lease as conversant as Tracy Clark in the media code, then they are not "citizen journalists" at all, but what I call "macramé journalists," or, worse, paperazzi.
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