The Mind of a Journalist: How Reporters View Themselves, Their World, and Their Craft. Jim Willis (2010).Los Angeles: Sage Publications. pp. 264.
Telling Our Stories: The Days of the Baltimore Sun. May 2010, http:// wbng.org/stories/ (accessed July 22, 2010).
Two recent works, a book and a Web site, may be useful supplementary texts for educators looking to explore the values, worldview, and socialization of journalists.
The Mind of a Journalist is a slim textbook that features interviews with a dozen journalists on the attraction of journalism and the values that shape the craft, along with topical issues such as anonymous sources, the journalist as a celebrity, and the influence of religious faith on reporting.
Telling Our Stories is a Web site created by thirty-two employees of the Baltimore Sun laid off during 2009. The essays, poems, photos, and video featured on the site capture the bittersweet spirit of a newspaper staff, from a remembrance of newsroom humor and to the frustrations of working with clueless editors and the pain of being fired.
Throughout Mind of a Journalist, author and professor Jim Willis sets out to explain what entices people to become reporters in spite of low salaries and a troubled industry. “Despite what some critics say, journalists don’t get turned on by developing biased and sensational stories that vent their personal views and sell as many newspapers as possible” (p. 165).
“What keeps journalists inspired is the chance—indeed the privilege—of being able to commit pure journalism: to seek answers to legitimate questions that caring people in a democracy need and have a right to know, to help us once again understand and feel for our fellow travelers on earth, and to enjoy the creative art of accurate reporting in the process” (p. 165).
The first half of the book is composed of eight chapters with titles such as “The Lure of Journalism,” “The Priesthood of Journalism,” and “The Journalist’s View of the World.” The book’s second half includes 100 pages of interviews and profiles with leading reporters nationwide. The interviews are quoted extensively throughout the book’s eight chapters, and separate profiles of each are included in an appendix. The testimony of these journalists provides a basic guide to a reporter’s internal thinking, such as the New York Times reporter Barry Bearak’s view of the detachment a journalist should have while reporting: “It’s pretty obvious you shouldn’t be writing about your friends, but it’s just as dangerous to be writing about people you’d like to recruit as your friend….I simply drew the line: sources over here, friends over there” (p. 35).
The book is perhaps best suited for college-level survey classes in media studies and mass communication, or for high school students investigating career possibilities in journalism. Several chapters contain material that would intersect with curricula of these classes, such as the overview of media theory (pp. 45-47) and references to the work of sociologist Herbert J. Gans in chapters three and five. The book also provides practical discussion material. For example, the influence of consultants on local television news (p. 126) would tie in well with discussions of corporate media ownership and concentration. However, these references and the subsequent discussions at times are broad and brief. Willis spends just one paragraph on the concept of ethnocentrism in media (pp. 31-32), just over a page each on diversity of journalists (p. 37) and how it benefits newsrooms (pp. 55-56).
The book is best suited to explaining and interpreting the practical theory behind the craft of journalism to non-journalists and correcting misconceptions students often have about reporters. The discussion, “News as a Reflection of a World” (pp. 30-31), is useful in addressing the classic question asked by many first-year media students, “Why not print more good news?” Willis spends four pages contrasting the approaches of CNN newsmen Anderson Cooper and Lou Dobbs, a comparison that, with video examples, could be used to spark discussion in the classroom.
Students in non-survey classes may best enjoy the epilogue and appendix profiles in the back. Several provide interesting discussion material, such St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Ron Harris’s account of chasing down the story of a Marine whose fiancé was killed in 9/11 and whose family landscape business fell apart because of his decision to serve. Harris could not verify the man’s story and decided he couldn’t run it: “I could easily have just said, ‘this marine said this’ … And some people would have fallen in love with it and put it on the wire, and put my name all over the place” (p. 138). “But I couldn’t prove that story to be true, and I wasn’t going to send back information that wasn’t true.…You can’t play fast and loose because the same standards that you have over here, you’ve got to use over there” (p. 138).
Similarly useful is Michael Perlstein’s first-person account of dealing with his personal emotions while covering Hurricane Katrina for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which begins: “As the body count rose with Katrina’s flood waters, each of us reached our own point of psychic overload, that inevitable moment when the ruination of our city became too much to bear” (p. 167).
Even within the context of a journalism class, the scope of Mind of a Journalist may prove to be limited. The book does not address multimedia convergence and its influence on journalism’s traditional values (the debate on transparency versus objectivity, for example). There is little focus on the troubled industry and the influence of new media.
Students, especially student journalists, may also benefit from a selection of readings chosen from Telling Our Stories: The Days of the Baltimore Sun. The site is essentially a small book of essays funded with a grant from the Foundation of the Writers Guild of America, East, and will be permanently hosted online by the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild.
The project asked thirty-two staffers laid off from the Baltimore Sun in 2009 to “tell a story arising out of their personal experiences during their time” at the newspaper. Most notable here is the essay, “Black Homo Blues,” by music and culture critic Rashod Ollison. He describes the feelings of frustration, isolation, and invisibility he felt as a gay black man in a majority white newsroom. “Why am I just realizing that others here … don’t see me at all?” he writes. “Before this place started falling apart, I, like so many brothers and sisters of color in the white man’s corporate world, was sucked into that toxic vortex known as The Delusion of Inclusion. Lord, silly me. I should have known better.”
In addition to providing an opportunity to discuss race, Ollison’s work captures a critique of the corporate newsroom. He writes frankly about the black reporter who advises him to not “be too black around here, it may not be a good thing,” and the editors who can offer no other advice other than “try to produce more” to avoid the inevitable layoffs:
There was a mandate for more 1A stories from everybody. The work was being quantified now. The days of thoughtful, narrative features were gone as editors became more concerned with just moving copy. Crafting ideas? Please, who had time for that?
Other stories, such as “Sports desk’s bloopers and practical jokes,” by Ray Frager, and “Jokes from the Crypt,” by Steve Auerweck, offer students a peek at the notoriously witty people who populate every newsroom. “A wander through the vast archives reveals personalities,” writes Auerweck. “The vicious malcontents, the whimsical, the grammarians to whom the misuse of the pluperfect subjunctive is a laff riot.” Auerweck recreates the Sun’s “Wall,” a pillar in the newsroom covered with overheard-in-the-newsroom quotes scribbled on scraps of paper. For example: “Gov. William Donald Schaefer: ‘Read my lips, I never said it.’ Doug Birch: ‘Read my lips, I have it on tape.’”
Additional material, such as the essay, “Behind the Lens,” and the slideshow, “A Sense of Wonder,” offer portraits of photojournalists Monica Lopossay and Jed Kirshbaum and the values that shape their work. In “The S on my Chest Stands for Sun,” reporter Doug Donovan describes diving “deep into the muck” as a City Hall reporter. “It’s an awesome responsibility to report on the powerful institutions of government,” he writes. “It’s even more awesome when your stories change the nature of those very institutions. That’s the power of the press, especially the big city daily newspaper. And no paper did it better than The Sun.”
Not every essay on the site will be useful for educators. Some are brief notes of thanks and remembrances. (One piece is even an epic poem titled, “The Copy Editor.”) Also, unlike Mind of a Journalist, the site does not explicitly name and discuss the values that reporters operate by and the ethical dilemmas they face. However, professors will find ample material to use in illustrating such discussions, making the site a useful supplement in survey courses and journalism classrooms that is sure to captivate a student audience.
STACY SPAULDING
Towson University