A few summers ago, I was asked to write obituaries for living people. Once written, they would sit in a file somewhere, waiting patiently for their subjects’ numbers to come up.
It was my first experience with professional journalism, a summer internship at my hometown newspaper. My editors wanted me to call aging citizens and get their life stories for a “repository of the area’s history.” It seemed dishonest and morbid to write someone’s last chapter before they’d been put into the ground. So, I methodically wrote and researched daily news stories and placed calls for other long-term projects. This incident was the first in a series that dissuaded me from my ambitions in journalism.
The editors told me that doing it their way, we could give a person a comprehensive obituary without having to mingle with mourners at the funeral, begging for quotes and anecdotes. With the obit in hand, we could publish it the same day! They said The Sunday Times in London employed a whole department to write obituaries for prestigious, still-breathing individuals.
I didn’t write a single obituary that summer. I sat at my desk, bored out of my mind, and took one bathroom break, coffee break and walk after another. The news was slow—it was a small town during summer. Funnily enough, most of the real, poorly-paid reporters did exactly as much as I did and seemed to love the work as little as I did too.
Like almost every other American boy with literary aspirations, I was swept up by the legend of Ernest Hemingway. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” became my favorite book, and I dreamed of becoming a foreign correspondent and of wagering my life in the struggle for my beliefs. It was so manly, so American. Papa’s gory, lonely death by his own hand was an issue that could be overlooked.
While studying abroad in Chile last semester, I arranged an internship with a foreign correspondent working in town. I hadn’t totally given up on journalism, and hoped that his work was as romantic as the job title.
This authentic foreign correspondent and I only met three times (twice over beers) and then he disappeared from the face of the earth. Through our conversations, I learned that he was from a wealthy family and that some of his money came from sizeable real-estate investments. His journalism income came from freelance work, writing four or five magazine articles a year and selling each to dozens of publications in various languages. He spent most of his time marketing himself, not actually writing.
He said that when he wrote real, timely articles for newspapers—mostly covering elections—he would often prepare weeks in advance, calling experts and asking them to hypothesize about several outcomes: What if Candidate “A” wins by a lot? A little? What if Candidate “B” comes from behind? This conjecture formed the bulk of his articles—the actual substance was tacked on later.
It became abundantly clear to me that the news is big business. And it’s based largely on two factors: how quickly it’s delivered and how engaging it is. Readers and viewers expect journalists to deliver information and a credible interpretation 10 minutes after an event occurs. And journalists spend most of their time obsessing over the first two sentences in their articles, coaxing you to read on by hook or by crook. The rest flows out after, and can be cut down for length.
Being correct, of course, is important. How often have you watched CNN after a momentous event and seen the anchors say nothing of substance for hours?
On Sept. 11th, every major news network was playing the game—pulling experts and witnesses and those affected by the events onto the screen one after another. If you can’t say anything, you might as well blab on about nothing.
The public is vicious when mistakes are made, despite how difficult all of it is to monitor—no major newspaper could call everyone who was quoted in every article written in a day to verify quotations and to check facts. Sometimes, little white lies or alterations can make articles immensely more interesting.
More than ever, the world needs savvy, honest reporters, who can produce accurate and interesting work within the confines of the bureaucracy and red tape that scared me off. Perhaps the public should lower its standards—looking for factuality rather than entertainment or promptness. Either way, today’s journalists must negotiate a mountain of ethical dilemmas, and we must give them room to maneuver. Otherwise, who will ever want to deliver the news?
