Journalism Today
Twenty-five years ago, I graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in Radio, Television, and Motion Pictures (which is now called "Journalism and Mass Communications"), a degree that I have never used in real life. However, part of earning that degree was a requirement to take an Introduction to Journalism class. UNC has an excellent journalism school with marvelous professors and I was fortunate to have one of them, although it wasn't Professor Shumacher of Jeff MacNelly's Shoe cartoons. She was a stickler for attendance and good writing and to this day, I remember her basic rules, using some of them each time I write a marketing piece or edit a book One of them is the inverse pyramid rule. This involves answering the questions "Who? What? Where? How? When?" and then creating an opening line that not only answers them but also puts the most important information first.
I remember putting that to use with an assignment that involved conducting a survey of friends and other students and asking them what their favorite word was. Everyone had a different word, so my opening statement couldn't be something like "Eight out of 50 college students say 'chocolate' is their favorite word." Instead, I looked at the answers they gave me for why the word was their favorite and the answer, for the most part, was that they liked the way that word sounded. So, I started out my "article" with "In a recent survey, college students revealed that their favorite word is based on how it sounds." I got an A from my professor for that and an A in the course, so, of course, that means I am an expert in journalism and therefore qualified to write about how journalism has gone horribly wrong in this day and age. (Okay, not really, but many "experts" on other subjects are about as qualified to write about their subjects as I am about journalism and they get away with it, so why not I?)
The two basic rules of journalism when I studied it was to leave editorializing for the op-ed pages and to report nothing but the facts. The most important part of that rule was to eschew adjectives and adverbs when at all possible. The second rule was to keep ourselves out of the article because readers weren't interested in the writers--they were interested in the subject of the article. Unfortunately, shortly after I graduated, these rules fell by the wayside, starting with a horrible trend in magazine writing that I lay at the door of such magazines as Spin and Vanity Fair that has now spread to such respected newspapers as the New York Times.
I remember how excited I was when Spin first came out. As my earlier blog post attests, I love music. In those days, I loved reading about music almost as much as I loved listening to it. But after reading a few articles, I was horrified. The magazine was patronizing and pseudo-intellectual, and most of the articles that were supposed to give a history of a band were, instead, a history of the writer's original slathering sycophantic love of the band that soon turned to a rabid, vitriolic hatred because the band had either released an album (CD for you young people) that pleased most of the public or the leader of the band had snubbed the writer in some way. The writers constantly lambasted bands for "selling out" in metaphors that would make some of today's respected poets roll in their graves. I like metaphors as much as the next person and use them all the time, but I like to use them in a way that doesn't leave my readers wondering what hallucinogens I might have ingested or smoked before I picked up my pen or turned on my computer. When I read their scathing description of one of R.E.M.'s albums as being "Pre-raphaelite, dancing in the kudzu cotton candy," I decided then and there to stop reading the magazine. Granted, Michael Stipe was sporting blonde curls at the time (this was before he started shaving his head), but those curls are "Raphaelite" not "pre-Raphaelite" and his curls had nothing to do with R.E.M.'s music. Unfortunately, metaphors that stretch the boundaries of the English language are now de rigeur for most music magazines, unless you pick up something like Death Metal Today, which explains how to achieve the right combination of gutteral screaming and endless heavy metal riffs that would make Slash proud.
This insidious injection of the writer into magazine articles has now extended itself into interviews with famous people. It used to be, in the old days, that you could pick up a magazine that advertised an interview with Brad Pitt and it would start with a brief description of the location of the interview and then go right into the interview. It might go something like this: "Brad Pitt is sitting in the living room of his recently completed home overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Relaxing on a leather sofa, with pictures of his and Angelina Jolie's children on a nearby table, he answered some questions about his current film projects, being an adoptive parent, and his plans for the future. Here's what he had to say." (I purposely left out the number of children in the photographs because Angelina seems to adopt children at the same rate that I add to my huge shoe collection.)
I subscribe to People magazine, and to give them credit, they still have interviews like that for the most part. Sadly, magazines that are more respected than People have completely abandoned this form of interview. Instead, we readers are force-fed mindless pap regarding the writer's feelings before and during the interview. This turns the Brad Pitt interview into something like this:
It's at this point that I usually stop reading because a) I can't stand that entertainment writing that says it's okay to use "dish" or tries to toss in some really bad French in an attempt to sound more sophisticated and b) I realize that the only quotes from Brad are going to be those that are directed at the writer. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but when I want to read an interview with Brad Pitt, I want to hear what Brad Pitt has to say. I couldn't care less about how the name-dropping writer feels about Brad Pitt or her history with Brad Pitt or whose dresses she wears. I want to know what films are in his future, what books he's reading, his favorite director, and how his project to help rebuild the Gulf Coast going. (Of course I also want to know if he really plans to be with Angelina for the rest of his life, but I am realistic enough to know he wouldn't address that topic.) I also hope for tons of pictures of him--another reason why I like People interviews--they usually have 2 or 3 good shots of Brad in their articles about him.
In the end, I wonder if writers like my fictional writer simply read other interviews with him and write about their feelings to cover up the fact that they've never been closer to Brad Pitt than spying him across a huge ballroom at a charity event. My sister and I even considered starting a parody magazine called Vanity, that would be filled with nothing but self-indulgent articles centered on how we felt about celebrities, but these days, I wonder if anyone would get that it was a parody.
Not content to toss impartial interviews with celebrities and other figures out the window, today's breed of journalist has decided that even the supposed bastion of objectivity, the newspapers, should also include the writer in them. The way they do this is a little more subtle than the adulatory or disdainful entertainment magazines, but it's just as horrifying to this subscriber to old-school journalism. Instead, these journalists decide that because it's very difficult to get a publisher to believe that they are the next William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez rolled into one, that they will prove it in every newspaper article they write. And thus they break my favorite professor's other rule--they inject every possible adjective and adverb into their article, while burying the main story somewhere on page 2.
For example, if there were a shooting outside a night club, an article (or "story" as my professor called it) written by someone who studied journalism with me would probably start out like this, "At approximately 11:30 p.m. on June 30, a gunman wearing a stocking mask shot and killed James Thomas Rogers, 38, of Durham, outside the Silver and Gold club at 127 South Saunders Sreet in Raleigh." Even saying "an unidentified gunman" would be considered editorializing because "unidentified" is subjective--people at the club might not have known the gunman, but someone else might have been able to identify him. Well, no more. Today's story would be something like this:
It used to be that local papers were only guilty of such writing and that the national papers, or the ones that were highly respected, like the Washington Post still stuck to the facts. Then came the fateful day, when I opened the Post and read, "The sky was a bright azure blue, a perfect contrast to the sun high above the horizon and the peaceful green field where Jack Kent Cook, the former owner of the Washington Redskins, was finally laid to rest." And then the final blow: An article in the New York Times about how many schools were taking recess out of the school day so that they could add more subjects to the day that started out with (I don't remember the girl's real name, so I'm going to make one up): "Caitlin Goodwin rests her chin on her hands and stares out the window of her school room at the playground where rusting swings sway gently in the wind and grass grows out of the cracks in the cement where boys used to gather to play basketball and four-square. The teacher calls her attention back to the subject and she sighs. Later she says, 'I miss going out to play with my friends.' Caitlin is not alone. Children all over the country are losing that once hallowed special time where relationships were built and wars raged among the sexes: recess."
The only newspaper I can think of that doesn't do this is USA Today, which I refuse to read because it's written so that George W. Bush can understand it. Since T.V. journalism doesn't exist any more (that's a different blog), I'm reduced to getting my news from NPR, which, although it uses odd sound effects to bolster a story, still tells it to you pretty straight. So, basically, I pay attention to People and NPR. That's kind of a nice mix in a way. I just hope that my journalism professor has gone to that giant newsroom in the sky because I can't imagine how she could live with what people think is journalism today.
I remember putting that to use with an assignment that involved conducting a survey of friends and other students and asking them what their favorite word was. Everyone had a different word, so my opening statement couldn't be something like "Eight out of 50 college students say 'chocolate' is their favorite word." Instead, I looked at the answers they gave me for why the word was their favorite and the answer, for the most part, was that they liked the way that word sounded. So, I started out my "article" with "In a recent survey, college students revealed that their favorite word is based on how it sounds." I got an A from my professor for that and an A in the course, so, of course, that means I am an expert in journalism and therefore qualified to write about how journalism has gone horribly wrong in this day and age. (Okay, not really, but many "experts" on other subjects are about as qualified to write about their subjects as I am about journalism and they get away with it, so why not I?)
The two basic rules of journalism when I studied it was to leave editorializing for the op-ed pages and to report nothing but the facts. The most important part of that rule was to eschew adjectives and adverbs when at all possible. The second rule was to keep ourselves out of the article because readers weren't interested in the writers--they were interested in the subject of the article. Unfortunately, shortly after I graduated, these rules fell by the wayside, starting with a horrible trend in magazine writing that I lay at the door of such magazines as Spin and Vanity Fair that has now spread to such respected newspapers as the New York Times.
I remember how excited I was when Spin first came out. As my earlier blog post attests, I love music. In those days, I loved reading about music almost as much as I loved listening to it. But after reading a few articles, I was horrified. The magazine was patronizing and pseudo-intellectual, and most of the articles that were supposed to give a history of a band were, instead, a history of the writer's original slathering sycophantic love of the band that soon turned to a rabid, vitriolic hatred because the band had either released an album (CD for you young people) that pleased most of the public or the leader of the band had snubbed the writer in some way. The writers constantly lambasted bands for "selling out" in metaphors that would make some of today's respected poets roll in their graves. I like metaphors as much as the next person and use them all the time, but I like to use them in a way that doesn't leave my readers wondering what hallucinogens I might have ingested or smoked before I picked up my pen or turned on my computer. When I read their scathing description of one of R.E.M.'s albums as being "Pre-raphaelite, dancing in the kudzu cotton candy," I decided then and there to stop reading the magazine. Granted, Michael Stipe was sporting blonde curls at the time (this was before he started shaving his head), but those curls are "Raphaelite" not "pre-Raphaelite" and his curls had nothing to do with R.E.M.'s music. Unfortunately, metaphors that stretch the boundaries of the English language are now de rigeur for most music magazines, unless you pick up something like Death Metal Today, which explains how to achieve the right combination of gutteral screaming and endless heavy metal riffs that would make Slash proud.
This insidious injection of the writer into magazine articles has now extended itself into interviews with famous people. It used to be, in the old days, that you could pick up a magazine that advertised an interview with Brad Pitt and it would start with a brief description of the location of the interview and then go right into the interview. It might go something like this: "Brad Pitt is sitting in the living room of his recently completed home overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Relaxing on a leather sofa, with pictures of his and Angelina Jolie's children on a nearby table, he answered some questions about his current film projects, being an adoptive parent, and his plans for the future. Here's what he had to say." (I purposely left out the number of children in the photographs because Angelina seems to adopt children at the same rate that I add to my huge shoe collection.)
I subscribe to People magazine, and to give them credit, they still have interviews like that for the most part. Sadly, magazines that are more respected than People have completely abandoned this form of interview. Instead, we readers are force-fed mindless pap regarding the writer's feelings before and during the interview. This turns the Brad Pitt interview into something like this:
When I learned that I had the assignment of interviewing Brad Pitt while he relaxed on his buttery-smooth leather sofa dishing about his movies, kids, and the 'Brangelina' phenom, I felt a flutter of excitement. I had met Brad at a party thrown by Elton John right after his huge success with Tom Cruise in Interview and had found him to be a decidedly avowed bachelor ala Clooney. Now that he's a father several times over with la belle Angelina and a lifestyle centered more around 2 a.m. feedings and diapers than hanging at with the A-List until 2 a.m., I was looking forward to seeing how he had changed. Of course, the woman in me was also hoping that he'd remember our intense conversation and my beloved black Versace frock that everyone told me turned me into a 'hot vixen.'
So, with breathless anticipation, I boldly rang the doorbell at Chez Pitt-Jolie. Brad answered the door, cellphone in hand and clad in one of his pale, slightly-see-through shirts he sports that reminded me of why I and all the other women in the world are prone to swooning at the sight of those unbelievable pecs. He put his hand over the receiver of the phone and said, 'Talking to Angie about what Maddox should take for his cold. I'm almost through.' Oh, how the mighty have fallen! The great Brad Pitt--Sexiest Man Alive, jetsetter extraordinaire, movie star, was not talking to Martin Scorsese about his next Oscar-nominated film--no, he was consulting with 'Angie' about his kid's cold.
True to his word, he was off the phone in a jiff. Inviting me into his gorgeous, architectural marvel of a living room, he told me to have a seat and twinkled those wonderful blue eyes at me. 'Well, here we are,' he said. 'A little bit different than partying with Elton John. Do you still have that black dress?'
And then I got it. The secret to his success. How he got both Jennifer and Angelina. He remembers things--important things. Things that make people feel good, no, strike that, that make women feel good. I knew then and there that this interview was going to go totally his way and that was fine with me.
It's at this point that I usually stop reading because a) I can't stand that entertainment writing that says it's okay to use "dish" or tries to toss in some really bad French in an attempt to sound more sophisticated and b) I realize that the only quotes from Brad are going to be those that are directed at the writer. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but when I want to read an interview with Brad Pitt, I want to hear what Brad Pitt has to say. I couldn't care less about how the name-dropping writer feels about Brad Pitt or her history with Brad Pitt or whose dresses she wears. I want to know what films are in his future, what books he's reading, his favorite director, and how his project to help rebuild the Gulf Coast going. (Of course I also want to know if he really plans to be with Angelina for the rest of his life, but I am realistic enough to know he wouldn't address that topic.) I also hope for tons of pictures of him--another reason why I like People interviews--they usually have 2 or 3 good shots of Brad in their articles about him.
In the end, I wonder if writers like my fictional writer simply read other interviews with him and write about their feelings to cover up the fact that they've never been closer to Brad Pitt than spying him across a huge ballroom at a charity event. My sister and I even considered starting a parody magazine called Vanity, that would be filled with nothing but self-indulgent articles centered on how we felt about celebrities, but these days, I wonder if anyone would get that it was a parody.
Not content to toss impartial interviews with celebrities and other figures out the window, today's breed of journalist has decided that even the supposed bastion of objectivity, the newspapers, should also include the writer in them. The way they do this is a little more subtle than the adulatory or disdainful entertainment magazines, but it's just as horrifying to this subscriber to old-school journalism. Instead, these journalists decide that because it's very difficult to get a publisher to believe that they are the next William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez rolled into one, that they will prove it in every newspaper article they write. And thus they break my favorite professor's other rule--they inject every possible adjective and adverb into their article, while burying the main story somewhere on page 2.
For example, if there were a shooting outside a night club, an article (or "story" as my professor called it) written by someone who studied journalism with me would probably start out like this, "At approximately 11:30 p.m. on June 30, a gunman wearing a stocking mask shot and killed James Thomas Rogers, 38, of Durham, outside the Silver and Gold club at 127 South Saunders Sreet in Raleigh." Even saying "an unidentified gunman" would be considered editorializing because "unidentified" is subjective--people at the club might not have known the gunman, but someone else might have been able to identify him. Well, no more. Today's story would be something like this:
The four year old boy with chocolate brown eyes the size of a CD clutched the tattered stuffed dog against his chest as he solemnly announced, 'I can't sleep. All the sirens woke me up.'
This boy and a handful of other stunned residents of the block next to the Silver and Gold club are standing outside their homes in the thick Raleigh summer air. A group of teenaged girls stands in front of their bungalow, arms locked, crying. 'Someone was killed down there,' one of them sobs, pointing at the club. 'It could have been one of us. It could've.'
A woman, bowed over in a combination of premature aging and arthritis, shakes her head sadly and says, 'This used to be a good neighborhood. Then that club came. It's a shame. Partying and drinking all night. And now this. You have to wonder what's next.'
What's next indeed. The once proud neighborhood with romantic Sears craftsmen bungalows and a few graceful Queen Anne homes has been rocked with horrifying incident after incident since the city gave a permit to the Silver and Gold Club and it opened its doors two year ago. Fights, DWIs, and reckless behavior have become the norm, shattering the peace that residents used to take for granted. And tonight, tragedy. For tonight, James Thomas Rogers, 38, of Durham, was brutally shot and killed in cold blood by an unidentified gunman who fled in a tattered Buick missing a headlight and several hubcaps. With this wild killer still on the loose, the neighbors have every right to be upset and worried.
It used to be that local papers were only guilty of such writing and that the national papers, or the ones that were highly respected, like the Washington Post still stuck to the facts. Then came the fateful day, when I opened the Post and read, "The sky was a bright azure blue, a perfect contrast to the sun high above the horizon and the peaceful green field where Jack Kent Cook, the former owner of the Washington Redskins, was finally laid to rest." And then the final blow: An article in the New York Times about how many schools were taking recess out of the school day so that they could add more subjects to the day that started out with (I don't remember the girl's real name, so I'm going to make one up): "Caitlin Goodwin rests her chin on her hands and stares out the window of her school room at the playground where rusting swings sway gently in the wind and grass grows out of the cracks in the cement where boys used to gather to play basketball and four-square. The teacher calls her attention back to the subject and she sighs. Later she says, 'I miss going out to play with my friends.' Caitlin is not alone. Children all over the country are losing that once hallowed special time where relationships were built and wars raged among the sexes: recess."
The only newspaper I can think of that doesn't do this is USA Today, which I refuse to read because it's written so that George W. Bush can understand it. Since T.V. journalism doesn't exist any more (that's a different blog), I'm reduced to getting my news from NPR, which, although it uses odd sound effects to bolster a story, still tells it to you pretty straight. So, basically, I pay attention to People and NPR. That's kind of a nice mix in a way. I just hope that my journalism professor has gone to that giant newsroom in the sky because I can't imagine how she could live with what people think is journalism today.
posted by Froshty | 9:17 AM
5 Comments:
Hmmm...for years I've been blaming this hideous turn in journalism on the likes of Bob Herbert (with whom I almost always agree, but he must have been the one who wrote that recess article for the Times). Little did I know it all originated with Spin Magazine.
Here's what else I hate, which NY Times journalists do ALL the time: "A recent visitor to Brad Pitt's home noted..." as if you don't know perfectly well from the rest of the article that "the recent visitor" is the journalist him/herself. LEAVE yourself out of the article, dammit. Don't PRETEND to be leaving yourself out of the article.
Yes, by alluding to themselves as "a recent visitor," they are being coyly self-indulgent which is almost worst than just inserting yourself into the article.
Of course, sometimes they say "a recent visitor" to hide the fact that they had read an article about Brad Pitt's house in the National Enquirer and they don't want to admit it.
From Linser: "You absolutely nailed it. The thing that also bugs me, which you demonstrated so well, is that not only is the writing not journalistic, it's also painfully bad. AND IT GETS PUBLISHED! Also you left out the slightly more endearing NPR phenomenon of the rooster crowing before a segment on farms in Belgravia, or, of course, the sound of slurping coffee preceding an interview with a cafe owner. Maybe that's material for another blog."
Linser, I toyed with the NPR sound effects as a subject, but it's not really my own subject. It's yours and Alex's. I did mention that it was endearing there at the end. I also left out a rant on having three sources to verify your story before printing or broadcasting because one day I'll do a rant on how CNN, NBC, CBS news shows are basically "Entertainment Tonight" with more solemn undertones.
What breaks my heart is that the really bad writing is published because people think that a sentence with 10-12 "cool" modifiers (like "stunned" and "compelling") is GOOD WRITING! Is it any wonder that my own daughters, who are good writers, do poorly on standardized writing tests?
I love the line about how USA today is written so George W. can understand it. Hope to see an objective essay on Billy Packer from you soon Froshty.
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