Written Pyramids

I'm a big fan of the New York Times. (" I confess, I lust after the Sunday Times," I once whispered to a friend, after spending six dollars on a newspaper. "Yeah, so do I," he said.)

I also like NYTimes.com, and since I get the Washington Post in print, I now usually read the Times on line, and buying it is a pleasure reserved for days when I need a boost, or when the front page is irresistible (as it was today, actually.) Anyway, being a fan of NYTimes.com, I agreed to fill out the Nielsen survey when it popped up on my screen, something I would normally just ignore (which leads me to wonder how helpful surveys like that are, if only loyal readers fill them out).

All was going well -- sections? I read a majority of them. Blogs? I read a lot of them How often? Seven days a week-- until I got to the part where they ask you to fill out things about yourself.

Behold:

Which of the following best describes the type of business, industry, or profession in which you work?

Click one.

		Accounting
		Advertising/Marketing/Public Relations
		Agriculture/Farming
		Architecture/Interior Design
		Arts/Entertainment/Broadcasting/Publishing
		Automotive/Aerospace
		Computer - Hardware/IT
		Computer - Software/Programming
		Construction/Labor/Trades Industry
		Engineering/R&D
		Fashion/Design/Modeling
		Finance/Banking/Investment Services
		Food Service/Lodging
		Healthcare/Medical
		Human Resources
		Insurance
		Law/Legal
		Manufacturing/Operations
		Non-Profit (not including Religion)
		Pharmaceutical/Biotechnology
		Raw Materials (Oil, Gas, Mining, Lumber, etc.)
		Real Estate Industry
		Religion/Ministry
		Retail/Wholesale
		Social Services
		Sports/Recreation
		Telecommunications Industry
		Transportation/Warehousing
		Travel/Tourism
		Utilities
		Other

That's right: 30 choices, and I had to choose "Other." Am I "Arts/Entertainment/ Broadcasting/Publishing"? I don't think so, and I'm not "Telecommunications Industry" either. This happens a lot on surveys, but it bothered me because I'm reading the NEW YORK TIMES and there is no place for print journalists. Sigh.

A friend was once walking with a large group of his co-editors in the middle of the night. A fire engine drove past, sirens on, and he left his group to walk in the opposite direction to follow the sirens.

Today, I saw a reporter who seemed to come from... I don't know. Maybe the early 1900's? I have a feeling that reporters never really dressed like this. In the early 1900's they weren't dapper, just drunk and uneducated. This guy was wearing a full suit -- we were in Pittsburgh not on the Hill. I don't think I've ever seen one quite like it. Later, the protester, gray haired, but loud, wearing a "COAL IS DIRTY" t-shirt, asked the reporter to clear up what she saw as the editorial board's faulty reporting. He tried three times to cut in before he managed to say. "I don't have anything to do with editorial. I'm just a business reporter.
Do business reporters wear suits and crazy mustaches? I only know one, and I don't know if he wears suits (I doubt it), but I know he does not have a mustache.

I have a lot of friends who are newspaper dorks. That's not surprising considering the amount of time I spent at my college newspaper, but a series of unrelated conversations this week highlighted the extent of our beloved, excited, nerdiness:

Over GChat:
Friend 1: I'm writing about the history of the news ombudsman for my journalism class... which is a geekily exciting topic.
Me: oh my, that's an awesome topic. [Friend 2] would be jealous.
Friend 1: the swedish root for ombudsman means "the man who sees to it that the snow and ice and rubbish are removed from the streets and that the chimneys are swept." There's something charming about that
Me: yes. there is....
Friend 1: I just now appreciated how übermeta it is to write about ombudsmen. I'm writing about the people who write about the people who write about the world.
me: I just now appreciated, your use of an umlat in a gchat.

Meanwhile:
Me: He is writing a paper on the history of newspaper ombudsmen
Friend #2: Really?? That's sooooooo cool.

Over GChat:
Me: the society of environmental journalists beleives that reporters should send out FOIA requests at least once a month.
Friend 3, and former co-editor: they're right!
me: just blitz federal agencies and eventually something will come of itmy co reporter and I are sending three out today
Friend 3: oh, that warms my heart.
Later one the phone, she added: Freedom of information laws are my favorite laws.

Over Text-Message:
Me: The coffee here was terrible, so I really need caffeine
Me: (a few minutes later): I just left to ask for a Coke
Friend 2: Ha Ha the tough life of a reporter

Over Text-Message:
Me: The Washington Post used "rom com" instead of romantic comedy.
Friend 2: Noooooo

Over the phone:
Friend 4: I just came back from a talk by a Wall Street Journal Reporter, and he said journalists interpret the world. That made me so happy. It made me really excited about journalism.... I just called to tell you that.

When the news of the day, is that everyone is waiting, what to do for photos? Run photos of the press! Who are waiting! And stalking! This is the second photo or waiting media the Times has had on its Web site today. The first was of cameras outside of the State Capitol building. Now that NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer* has gone back down to Manhattan, the photo changed to people waiting there. I'm not criticizing. These photos means that everyone -- with the possible exception of a hiding Spitzer-- is doing his or her job. I just think it is amusing. How can you not laugh at a graf like this:

"The governor, a Democrat in his first term, then returned to his apartment on Fifth Avenue, where news vans and police cars clogged traffic. Mr. Spitzer did not emerge overnight and did not appear early Tuesday for his regular morning jog."

Yes that means, there were people on stake-out duty all night long. I've done it for a few hours, and it's not fun. Let's just hope they got to sit in their cars.

* I recognize that very soon, this title may be obsolete.

I've always been acutely aware that my body needs to be fully functioning in order to be a good journalist. I need to be able to see and hear in order to report and I need to be able to use my hands to write and my feet to get places or run after fire trucks. It's like those mother's day posters we made in kindergarden: My mommy uses her arms to hug me, my mommy uses her hands to make me lunch, my mommy uses her feet to drive me to school... You get the idea.

There is one reporter in my office who has no use of his legs. I admire him a lot. He's massively fast on his crutches, and when there was a rash of leg injuries in the office, he was generous with advice. Plus, he's a really smart reporter.

At my summer internship, there was one reporter who was battling Parkinson's disease. Slowly but surely, he was losing all of the physical tools needed to be a great reporter, and he struggled so much to use the computer. Watching him get frustrated, knowing he was struggling to do what he loved, was one of the saddest things I've seen.

But this newspaper-- which is struggling financially--keeps paying him and letting him come in a few hours a day, when he can to work on features, that by his own admission may be too old or too long to be published. But ask him anything about anything and he'll give you the entire history lesson, any background you need to know. He's rubbed shoulders with all the greats in the business and can tell you remarkable stories about Washington transforming around him over the decades. He was a remarkable metro reporter who became a very sharp court reporter, before fighting his body and watching his twin brother degenerate faster than he is. It's like looking into a mirror that shows you a year or two into the horrible future.

This post was going to be a quick and quirky post about getting my eyes tested and how I balked when the doctor asked me if he could dilate my pupils. "I understand," he said. "As soon as you said you were a journalist, I figured, you wouldn't want your pupils dilated." He made me another appointment for after deadline.

But I changed my mind. This post has become a tribute to the people who do this job with so much love for the craft and the profession, who never complain, and who make me grateful for my fully functioning body.

Thanks to all those people who teach me so much as they defiantly face their past and their future.

Title from the morning blessings of thanks in the siddur.

I am guilty of referring to "the press" in that conspiratorial way that implies that the newspapers and magazines are one entity and somehow share a mindset. (I just recently learned that "the press" does not referred to broadcast, which a friend pointed out I should have realized because only print is printed on presses. Right).

I did it purposefully, because I don't know anyone in broadcast, but also wanted to give off that conspiratorial tone, because I was talking about a take over. But since I used it that way, I will use it as an excuse to link to this older but wonderful Intellignecer post, excerpted bellow:

"What’s the most annoying thing about the press?" Ooh! We know!, we said to ourselves. It's the long hours and crappy pay and the e-mails from your mom that say, "I have a great idea for a story for you to write! About your cousin!" Or maybe the fact that people are always insulting you to your face by referring to you as though you are part of some freaky Masons-like conspiratorial organization called "the press" or "the media" and acting as though CNN's decision to air a buttload of Anna Nicole Smith coverage during the war is somehow your fault, personally. Or, wait, sorry, that's being 'the press.'"

... who have recently accepted jobs and internships at great papers all over the United States. (O.K. that's a lie. There are none on the east coast, or even relatively near the east coast . corrected: west coast, or even relatively near the west coast. Oh my. I have spent my whole life in the east, and yet cannot tell the two totally different coasts apart. (I also just remembered that I know someone who is going to intern in California, but she's known for a long time, so that doesn't count.))

Slowly but surely, my friends will take over the press.

I have a good friend who I worked with for two years at my school paper. During those two years, we made an excellent team. We co-authored or co-reported at least ten articles, including some scoops and analyses, and when we were on the same news board, we were part of a group of editors who fed off of each other for better or for worse. Our brainstorming sessions are magnificent. Our plan for the future involves becoming the next Woodstein.

Here is the problem. Our names do not combine well. Neither our first names nor our last names are at all pronounceable in one non-laugh-inducing word.

There is at least one other friend I can think of who I would make a good team with. But her name does not fare any better with mine.

Never mind that none of us work for the same paper or necessarily will in the foreseeable future. The death knell will be the inability of our future editor to summon us as if we are actually joined at the hip.

Oh yeah, and neither of us wants to grow up to be Bernstein. Sure, his book is doing OK, but both of us want to be the one who could pay the bail, not the one asking for it.

Photos from UPI and Getty respectively via The New York Times

Once I have two years of experience, I am applying to this. And then applying for the next three years until I get it. Wish me luck.

Yeah. I have a few.

• Why is this a t-shirt that needs to be created in the first place? It just doesn't seem that odd to me. Last night, a friend told me that the majority of his editors have been female.
• Aren't the reporters supposed to be asking the questions? (This one courtesy of a friend).
  
• Who writes with a typewriter, let alone a pink one?
• Is there anyway that the implications of this are not demeaning?
• Who would buy this? A friend suggested "lame high school editors".

Eww.

There is only one thing in my room which is even remotely politically charged -- O.K. I mean other than books. Let me rephrase. My apartment-mate has a tactfully decorated room with framed pictures of sunsets and national parks on her walls. My room, which has purposely unaligned photos of smiling friends, looks a bit more like a dorm room. She wears a bracelet that says "pro-life," I cannot, and would not, by virtue of my profession wear anything that overtly political (I wouldn't wear a pro-choice bracelet either. I wouldn't take a public stance on the issue, and this blog is not about my personal beliefs).

From a recent paper on the role of the author in journalism and Foucault:

"I found Foucault’s description of the shedding of the desire for immortality eerily similar to editor’s descriptions of putting out a newspaper. Though it took time for literary to change so that “the work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now posses the right to kill, to be it’s author’s murderer, as in the cases of Flaubert, Proust and Kafka"(Foucault, "What is an Author"), the maker of a newspaper has long been aware of the fact that not only is the work exhausting, but also that it never had the “duty of providing immortality.”

In his book, The One That Got Away, Howell Raines, a former executive editor of The New York Times wrote, “every newsroom is a ship of fools. Some are mad, some are funny, some brilliant, some priapic, a few tragic and, of course, a good many drunk or stoned. The best of them haunted by the knowledge that newspapers don’t create anything that lasts” (Raines, emphasis mine.). Bill Keller, the current executive editor of The Times acknowledged that “a daily newspaper affords you the chance to start all over the next day, (Keller)” and Ben Hecht, the playwright and screenwriter who started off writing for the Chicago Daily News covering, among other things, murders, described the newspaper as “the tyrannical journal that underpaid and overworked us, and for which, after a round of cursing, we were ready to die.”

The journalist author never wanted immortality; he sees his work as ephemeral, as a new blank slate each day. And, many of the journalists I have interacted with—both students and professionals—feed themselves dinner from the newsroom vending machine, smoke cigarettes, drink large amounts of alcohol, and fight off a constant exhaustion brought on by a daily news cycle. For a long time, daily newspapers have been well on their way to killing off their authors."

I love this profession.

Man. I didn't want to post until after midterms, but this blog post from the blog of the Chicago Tribune's DC bureau is too good to pass up. I'm glad to see that D.C. is not fun-sucking. Or maybe everyone will find a way to take a break from taking yourself too seriously if you get flown Down Under on the Tribune Company's dollar. Go read it now. Laugh a bit. It's only old by a few days. Favorite comment:

"What a great travel log. Why didn't they tell me about jobs like this when I was in school? I would have studied my English and History more and my art a little less."

Jobs like what? Like one of the Tribune's top Washington correspondents? This reporter filed at least once a day for the time he was in Australlia. (You have to scroll down a bit . The search function's a little off). I can't imagine what a time shift like that does to filing on deadline. And, I doubt that Hinstory or English would really prepare you better for that. (I say that as an English major).

At a speech at the Columbia Journalism School Walter Cronkite--who is not the larger than life figure I always imagined, but at 90 years old is an old man who struggled to climb onto the stage, stumbled when reading (but could make it into a joke) and has recently had minor surgery on his throat--bemoaned the profit-driven world of media today, pointing a finger at today's broadcasts and its "soundbite culture" for "turning a political race into political theater."

Despite his self described "doom and gloom" he still believes in the importance of news and his comments are worth mulling over.

"Even as we gather here today to do some critical thinking about the news business, let's please be very careful about where we lay the blame. From my perspective, the major problem these days is not the individual journalist by any means or the standards of the profession by any means. Young people I see entering into the field of journalism are no less intelligent or dedicated than in my generation some several years ago. They are indeed quite, I would say brave, to be entering our profession with far less job security... than the one I did. They do so I believe out of the deep sense of commitment to the public service. ...Today...they are assailed with inflated public expectations from Wall Street. They are faced with round after round of job cuts and cost cuts that require them to do evermore with ever less. In this information, age, in the very complicated world in which we live today, the need for high-quality reporting is greater than ever and we have had examples of that over these last several years in Washington. It's not just the journalist's job at risk here, it's American democracy, and it's freedom."

And some bonus nuggets:

"If I do have to drink something, it usually isn't water...that's [a drinking budget] not the sort of calculation a publisher makes when deciding to fund newspaper."

"You may be surprised to learn that I have never felt that TV news was a good substitute for a good newspaper. The number of words spoken in a standard TV broadcast barely equals the number of words on two thirds of a page of a standard newspaper."

And that's the way it is.


Photo of Cronkite on the set of the CBS Evening News by Irving Haberman via wikipedia.com

Note: The links in this post just go to the film studio websites so that I don't have to bother reminding you what the trailer looked like. All of the movies mentioned are worth seeing. This is why my friend thinks writing in blogs makes lazy writers.

Why is it that recently, reporters have been such hot topics in movies?
In the last four movies I saw in the theaters, reporters played at least a minor role in three: In The Holiday one of the heroines (I am really bad at naming actresses) is a journalist, in Blood Diamond, Jennifer Connelly (I looked that one up) is a reporter, complete with corny journalism lines that I loved and reviewers hated. (Me: "Everyone said she was really corny, but I loved the journalism jokes." Friend: "It's amazing that you have friends." Thanks.)

And, I saw The Last King Of Scotland tonight. Barring the torture scene that I missed entirely because my eyes were too tightly shut and so can't really call on, it was excellent and chilling. The London Times made a cameo appearance, as did the local Ugandan paper, that viewers were not supposed to trust. As did an entire press gaggle that drove me nuts. They listened to President Amin's self deprecating humor and spin and applauded.

Laughed and applauded. Yes, the movie takes place in the 70's, yes many of the journalists probably worked for state sponsored papers, but still. We lose enough integrity in the real world. Why play into the palm of a dictator's hand in movies too? Though, I suppose this was based on truth and therefore could have been what actually happened. I am not naive enough to convince myself that the journalists were more savvy than that, but I can at least hold my breath and hope.

Though people thought Connelly was ditzy and underdeveloped in Blood Diamond I have to give a lot of thanks for this line that everyone I know who is a journalist loved and everyone else rolled there eyes at:

I guess I should add to that that I hope that I can convince others why the information is in fact useful and important. But, there is also a thrill in just knowing. In being aware of the huge amount of information that is not useful, and loving it nonetheless.