Living Journalism

Principles and Practices for an Essential Profession

Rich Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351000987
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Giornalismo

In this readable, practical textbook Rich Martin explores the core principles and practices that beginning journalists need to produce work that informs and enlightens citizens hungry for accurate and trustworthy news.

The textbook's 16 concise chapters impart real-world examples demonstrating how the best journalists exemplify the key principles, as well as cautionary stories illustrating journalistic mistakes and missteps. It also contains exercises, checklists, tips and additional resources that students can use in class and independent study, making the book an ideal newsroom and classroom resource that can be returned to again and again for new insights.

For journalism to survive and flourish in the 21st century, it needs young practitioners who understand its importance to society, believe in and are committed to its core values, and can put those values into action. This new edition of Living Journalism is an excellent updated introduction to journalism for students, teachers and young professionals.

1	You’ve Got to Be a Little Crazy

Photojournalist Igor Kostin and his pilot approached the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after a 45-minute helicopter flight from Kiev, Ukraine. Military vehicles scurried around on the ground, until suddenly everything seemed to stop. In front of him, Kostin saw a large hole “like an open grave.” The roof of the plant’s No. 4 reactor, a 3,000-ton slab of concrete, had been blown off by an explosion.

“I saw the colors and the unbelievable light,” said Kostin, the first photojournalist on the scene. He had never seen anything like it before. No one else had, either.

The helicopter circled 150 feet above the glowing reactor, while Kostin shot pictures of what soon was recognized as the worst nuclear accident in history. His camera jammed after 20 or 30 shots. A second camera also malfunctioned, its motor destroyed by radiation. Back in Kiev, Kostin developed his film, but only the first six or seven exposures survived; everything else was black. He sent the most acceptable photo to his news agency, but the Soviet government suppressed early reports of the accident and blocked the photo’s publication.

The explosion at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986, spewed radiation over large portions of northern Europe and what was then the Soviet Union. At least 31 people were killed by radioactivity within two months, and hundreds of thousands of people were permanently displaced. The United Nations estimated that 10,000 people would ultimately die from cancers caused by radiation from the explosion. Groups such as Greenpeace insisted the final toll would be many times higher.

Kostin went back again and again to document what happened at Chernobyl. His news agency was willing to let him return, but it would not provide him with a car. “You do not understand,” his bosses told him. “A journalist is replaceable, but a car . . . .”

Kostin felt ill every time he returned to Kiev. To counter the effects of the radiation on his thyroid, he was told to drink vodka – half a glass for every two hours spent at the disaster site. It made little sense, but he followed the prescribed regimen anyway. In early 1987 he went to a military hospital in Moscow and received blood transfusions that made him feel slightly better. Photographs were not permitted, but Kostin smuggled in a camera and took pictures of other patients who had been contaminated by radiation from Chernobyl.

Chernobyl became Kostin’s life’s work. “I felt that history was being played out, and that someone had to devote themselves to it seriously,” he said in 2006. “My pictures are like an instruction manual for the next generation, so that something like it can never happen again.”¹

Igor Kostin might strike you as crazy. He would probably have agreed. Journalism, he once said, is not a profession for normal people. He didn’t mean that as an insult to journalists, or to normal people. He meant that journalists rush to the scene of the nuclear accident, the firestorm or the mass shooting to find out what happened and why. Normal people head the other way.

Some may find Kostin’s notion peculiar, romantic or even arrogant. After all, while professional journalists have learned their craft and honed their skills over many years, some people believe that anyone can be a journalist. In fact, that is what “citizen journalists” do today, using websites, blogs, YouTube videos and social media to independently report events in their neighborhoods and around the world. Janis Krums, a 24-year-old businessman from Sarasota, Florida, was on a New York ferry when US Airways Flight 1549 crash-landed in the Hudson River in January 2009. Using his iPhone, Krums took a picture of the plane resting on the river’s surface and posted it to Twitter. It was the first photo of the crash scene. “There’s a plane in the Hudson,” Krums tweeted. “I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.” Within a half hour of posting his photo, Krums was giving an eyewitness account of the crash to MSNBC.

It’s easy to forget now that Krums’s tweet “changed everything,” as Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey later told CNBC. “Suddenly the world turned its attention because we were the source of news – and it wasn’t us, it was this person in the boat using the service, which is even more amazing.”² Just a few months later, an anonymous person used a cellphone to document the violent death of a young woman named Neda Agha-Soltan during election protests in Iran. (The video was recognized as journalism, earning a prestigious George Polk Award for videography. The awards panel said it had never bestowed an honor on an anonymous work before.)³ Social media sparked protests and revolutions across the Arab world in 2011.⁴ When a massive earthquake hit Japan in 2011, people used social media to share breaking news and information about survivors and rescue efforts. Videos captured the devastation of the tsunami waves as they swept away entire communities. The speed of the Internet ensured that citizens around the world were up to date on the Fukushima nuclear power plant crisis in Japan – the worst since Chernobyl.

Social media posts by ordinary citizens have, in fact, become a common resource for how professional news organizations gather information today. Those posts were “kicking their ass when it came to breaking news,” says Brant Houston, Knight Chair for Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois. “It dawned on everybody that you can’t compete with people putting stuff up on social media.”⁵ Christina Zdanowicz, senior producer for CNN’s Social Discovery team, says her network was a “pioneer in citizen journalism” when it launched iReport in 2006 to capitalize on the increasing number of videos, photos and audio recordings by non-journalists at important news events. One early example: Video shot by a student captured sounds and scenes of the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech. Zdanowicz says she and her colleagues now monitor social media throughout the day to see what’s trending, and they chase the news almost immediately when something is posted.⁶

Such citizen accounts are not new. They were the lifeblood of the early days of American journalism, albeit created with different tools. Today we use smartphones, social media and other digital tools instead of the tracts, pamphlets and fliers used by the colonists. It’s likely that the initial Soviet cover-up of the Chernobyl accident would fall apart even faster today, thanks to social media and the digital world’s interconnectedness and accessibility. Stories and images today come at us all the time and from everywhere. Zdanowicz says CNN’s Social Discovery team works in an office but makes calls all over the world to collect images, sounds and eyewitness accounts of national and international events, from earthquakes and mass shootings to an airline dragging a passenger off an overbooked flight.

ESSENTIAL VALUES OF SEEKING AND REPORTING TRUTH

If anyone can post photos or tweet about such dramatic events as revolutions, earthquakes and police shootings, why would someone spend time learning to become a professional journalist?

Grassroots journalism is vital and cannot be underestimated. But it cannot always meet the needs of societies – democratic and nondemocratic alike. Citizens do not usually have the commitment and training of professionals, and they may not always bring strong journalistic methods and standards such as fact checking, fairness and independence to their efforts. This book is about those essential values and practices that have consistently guided the work of the best professional journalists over the years. These standards are still relevant at this critical time for journalism, and for you. The best journalists know that the truth they present is often provisional and that their work may never present a complete picture, even when they do their job well. But they know that they come closest when they adhere to time-honored standards.

Some values are obvious. Accuracy, curiosity and skepticism are cornerstones for the discipline of journalism. Other values may not be as apparent. You need to learn to ask good questions and get close to the stories you report; to pay close attention to details that other observers might miss; to prepare yourself for the unexpected; and to act as a watchdog who can monitor the powerful and give voice to those without influence.

Knowing and understanding the places you write about is essential. But you should also keep up with what’s going on around the world, in Syria and Venezuela, in Myanmar and the Congo. Be ambitious and take some chances, but learn from the inevitable setbacks that can occur when you take a risk. Take advantage of the new tools that help you do your job faster and more efficiently, but always keep in mind that technology should be a means to an end and not the end itself.

Strive to remember the humanity of the people you write about – people and their stories are what reporting is all about, Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter Douglas Pardue says⁷ – and remember your own humanity as well. And it’s important that you understand why and how you must protect your integrity. Integrity is really all you have as a journalist. If you compromise it, you can lose everything.

Some of these values may sound theoretical. But journalism is not theoretical, and you must put these values into practice every day and in every story you touch. They have guided the careers of many outstanding journalists whose work you’ll read about in these pages. Though you may not recognize all their names, all of them were committed to getting the news out honorably and professionally. They took their work to heart and tried to make the world a better place. Most of them would tell you their work was important and fun.

If you’re lucky – and if you’re good – you’ll be able to say the same thing.

ESSENTIAL PRACTICES

Getting information out to people quickly is what journalists have always done. But there’s more to journalism than writing, reporting and taking pictures, blogging and tweeting. Journalism is the only occupation specifically protected by the U.S. Constitution; it isn’t licensed or regulated like medicine or the law, but it does carry a similar sense of responsibility and obligation to a greater good, and that sets it apart from a simple trade. It requires a professional commitment to values and practices that may sound corny, but which have stood the test of time. The best journalists:

• Believe their job is to seek out truth as nearly as it can be ascertained, and then to report it accurately and fairly.

• Know that journalistic truths are often provisional. The truth they discover today may change tomorrow, and they must constantly reassess what they have ...