Baby's First Lesson In Journalism

Let me tell you about the first real article I ever wrote for a newspaper. Unsurprisingly, this story overlaps with my first ever all-nighter.

Second semester, freshman year of college. After spending the previous semester writing exclusively first-person essays, I had my first real bit of 'news': The nursing department obtained some new training equipment through a grant and I was to cover it. Rather cut-and-dry and boring, but I was a happy little puppy when I left the office, finally with an assignment.

I wouldn't take a journalism class until the next year. All of my writing up to this point had either been MLA composition or free-for-all creative writing. I had always been an okay writer and that was the problem. I could write, but I hadn't considered the technical differences between a seven page paper on serial killers for composition class and a newspaper piece. Don't mistake this for confidence. It was all dumb naivety.

I met with a representative from the nursing department for an interview. I brought five pens and a full blank notebook. And wouldn't you know it, she was just so easy to talk to, like a friend, and so nice. Interviewing wasn't about asking tough questions- it was just talking! Talk, talk, talk, about life and nursing and oh yes, nursing is very hard, my mother is one, so I know, and my aunts too, and la la la, this new equipment is very important, la la la, something something about the grant funding, la la la.

"Oh, and one last little thing," she said as we wrapped up. "Do you think you could e-mail me a copy of the article before it goes to print?"

"Oh." I was stunned. "Um, I guess so?" I thought it was strange, but she so nice that I didn't want to not be nice back. Embarrassing to say I was still concerned with such crap at 18, but it's true.

Deadline was Friday, and as I do when I'm nervous about something I need to write, I procrastinated. I was terrified that if I didn't get it to them as soon as possible on Friday, it wouldn't run, and my nerves kept me from concentrating. After a few sentences in which I announced the nursing department's good fortune, I was stuck. I kept going back over my handwritten notes, trying to extract an extra morsel or two of anything. What more was there to say? They got new equipment, THE END. Still, I knew that I couldn't just hand in a couple of paragraphs, so I unpacked my adjectives. Fantastic! Helpful! Necessary!

My anxiety increased with the hours, until bleary-eyed, I emailed it at 3:45 a.m. But there's no sleep for a worried freshman. I was afraid if I went to bed that I wouldn't wake up for my 9 a.m. photography class. I worked on a class paper until it was time to trudge to the other side of campus. I had never truly stayed up all night before; even at my most insomniac, I still got a few hours of sleep. My ass hurt from hours in my desk chair and my eyes were dry from staring at the computer screen for so long. I didn't drink coffee back then and I truly cannot remember how I went on without it.

It was after photography when I was eating lunch with a friend that the editor-in-chief tracked me down. "We need to talk," she said. "Meet me back in the office."

She started off by slapping on the desk a printed copy of the e-mail I sent with 3:45 a.m. circled. "First off, why the hell are you sending this so late at night?"

"I wanted to make sure you got." I knew that was the stupidest thing I could say as soon as that came out of my mouth. Admitting that I e-mailed a copy of it to the nursing department was also a mistake.

"Never, ever, ever send anyone a copy before it runs. Ever."

Then she went over every error, each eyesore circled in red.

"You wrote out every number. You don't do that. It's 13, not thirteen."
"This sentence is in passive voice. Don't do that. The less words, the better."
"Why are you using adjectives?!"

Eventually I had to admit that I never took a journalism class. She gave me a copy of the AP Stylebook off the bookshelf and told me to study it. She also found something of interest in how the grant was obtained and called up the nursing department to ask a few more questions. I was to come along to see it was done.

One of the most uncomfortable moments of my life was sitting in that conference room with the editor and the nursing rep I had previously chatted like an old friend-- not interviewed, let's get real. I'm older now than the editor was at the time, but I'm nowhere near as tough. She didn't hold back, firing questions with confidence and authority. With the editor, the nursing rep was a different person, defensive and quiet. The only witness to this awkwardness was the tape recorder sitting on the table between them, something which I neglected to bring the first time around (Editor: "What do you mean you didn't tape record the interview?").

There turned out to be no shady business with the grant. We went back to the newspaper office and I worked on the article under the editor's guidance. Around 3 p.m., I finally made it back to my dorm and immediately passed out. I woke up hungry six hours later in complete darkness.

Tempted as I am to only play up my mistakes, I don't think that'd be fair. I was a kid. A trusting, eager-to-please kid, the kind who are pushed over by niceness. Looking back, that editor taught me that the threat of seeming not nice should never get in the way of doing a good job. Unfortunately, it took a few more lessons for this kid to get it.

One thing did stick right away. A week later, I bought my own tape recorder.

Mr. Daisey and the Fact Factory

By now, I'm sure you've heard the news about Mike Daisey and the This American Life retraction. In case you haven't: Mr. Daisey, a monologist, performs a show called The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Part of it focuses on the working conditions at the Foxconn plants in China which manufacture Apple products and this was featured on the radio program This American Life as a piece of journalism. It was an incredibly popular show and became the most downloaded in TAL's history. The news broke Friday that major parts of the story were fabricated. Two of the most powerful scenes- a conversation he has with underage workers and an another with a mangled hand former worker poisoned by n-hexane touching an iPad for the first time- never happened.

I listened to the Retraction episode of TAL yesterday. I respect Ira Glass and his colleagues for their honesty and owning up to this mistake. I think they will get past this and their integrity to quality journalism will remain in tact. I've also read online comments that say the work of David Sedaris (a popular TAL contributor and writer) doesn't get this kind of scrutiny and that there is no way his own stories are 100 percent accurate. Some people defended Mr. Sedaris (who has received criticism of his own) by saying as a humorist, he is not held to the same standards as a journalist. After listening to Retraction, I think the differences between them lie more with their intentions. From the TAL transcript (emphasis mine):

Mike Daisey: And everything I have done in making this monologue for the theater has been toward that end – to make people care. I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. My mistake, the mistake that I truly regret is that I had it on your show as  journalism and it’s not journalism. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater and memoir to achieve its dramatic arc and of that arc and of that work I am very proud because I think it made you care, Ira, and I think it made you want to delve. 
And my hope is that it makes – has made- other people delve.

Mr. Daisey didn't create his show just as entertainment. In his own words, there was a specific reaction he wanted to provoke from the audience. Mr. Sedaris, on the other hand, wasn’t trying to change the plight of the seasonal worker when he wrote about dressing as one of Santa’s elves in his breakthrough essay “Santaland”.

David Carr from the NY Times brilliantly says to his colleague Brian Stetler in this short, great conversation on the difference between theater and journalism: "One of the takeaways from this is when people have a point of view as Mr. Daisey clearly did, the maker of the Kony 2012 video about the warlord, all have a point of view, what they did was compelling radio, compelling video, but there's another word for information and news that's gathered as a service to a message: propaganda." 

Mr. Daisey may throw up the excuse that he is not a journalist, but he went on a program that operates under the high standards of journalism with writing that presents itself as investigative reporting. He lied to the producers in order for more people to hear him. Not once during the Retraction episode does Mr. Daisey flat out admit that he lied ("I wouldn't express it that way" is how he puts it) and I think that stings the most. I understand that trying to find the 'truth' is a thousand shades of grey, but when the question is "Did you to lie to us?" there are only two answers: yes or no.

One of my favorite professors always pushed me to take myself out of my nonfiction stories. He would say that our perspective as observers isn't important for the action to happen. Most of us at 19 or 20 hadn't really lived through anything interesting, so the story didn't need to be told through our first person lens. He's right, here I am years later, still struggling with wanting to put myself in my work. It's easier, but that doesn't mean it's quality writing.

Mr. Daisey is not essential to tell the story of horrid working conditions in China. He did not need to fabricate those scenes when they are actually happening but not with him in it. For him to make up parts of it as a way 'to make people care' is disrespectful of journalists who are trying to do the same thing with honest, ethical reporting.