Soft Skills for the New Journalist

Cultivating the Inner Resources You Need to Succeed

Colleen Steffen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429952487
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Journalism is a pool staffed by distracted lifeguards and no matter how fancy your school is, your first week in a real newsroom will feel like a shove in the small of the back into 15 feet of water. Most of us come up for air eventually, but if you're like journalist and educator Colleen Steffen, you may still be left feeling like all that training in inverted pyramids and question lists left something important out: you!

Journalism is people managing, wrestling truth and story out of the messy, confusing raw material that is a human being, and the messiest human involved can often be the reporter themselves. So it's time to talk about it. Instead of nervously skirting the sizable EQ (emotional intelligence) portion of this IQ (intelligence intelligence) enterprise, Soft Skills for the New Journalist explores how it FEELS to do this strange, hard, amazing job—and how to use those feelings to better your work and yourself.

Chapter 1
A is for Attitude

“Attitude”: the reason Colleen Steffen got in trouble in high school. Also: the No. 1 thing to take to your future newsroom job, even more important than your packed lunch and copy of the First Amendment. A GOOD attitude, mind you, a spirit of humility in recognition of all you haven’t yet learned. Yes, it sucks.

So to start right in the middle, where most great stories start, the best way to do well in your present or future newsroom job is to know your stuff. See the rest of this book plus all other books. Like, come in having paid attention in class or at least having Googled “what does a reporter do.” The more prep you’ve done the better. This strikes me as generally good life advice, whether you’re picking a car mechanic, having a baby or telling truth to power as a member of the Fourth Estate.

But you can’t get ready for a new job like you’re cramming for the SAT. You’re not going to be able to study it all. Better to study how to be ready for anything. Better yet, when you’re packing your pencils and your inverted pyramids, to leave something behind on purpose—and the thing is your attitude, missy.

Don’t roll your eyes. I SEE YOU.

I’m talking a certain kind of attitude, which plagues a lot of fresh-faced journalists and is especially, extremely off-putting to newsroom veterans whose help and patience they need. And I think it isn’t really an attitude at all but actually a feeling in disguise.

It’s fear, fear you feel you must hide—fear that looks to others like arrogance.

Now some new reporters are actually arrogant—they think they’re better than. Their parents loved them too much and they were handed too many shiny awards at impressionable ages. And sometimes they’re actually that talented, like little journalistic Mozarts. Old reporters can be arrogant too, but they’re more likely to have done something to arrive at that state, like won a Pulitzer, so it’s (ever so slightly) harder to be annoyed at them.

The new reporter who acts like they broke the Watergate story when they can’t find the county courthouse, however? NO ONE likes them. Which means no one supports or helps them. Which means that poor sap struggles alone in an essentially collaborative job.

What would cause a newly arrived journalist to act like they invented the internet? How does this obnoxious behavior manifest? See if any of this sounds familiar:

• Not knowing something but not asking for more info, then messing up or taking eight times longer than necessary.
• Getting in over their head on a topic, and not asking for help, deadlines blowing by in the rearview mirror and mistakes obvious to any local riddling their copy.
• Trying to take up too much space, talking too definitively on too many topics and bragging too much on not enough accomplishments, with resulting general hatred.
• Pitching a fit when they don’t get handed the big story, the plum assignment, the premier space.
• Pitching a fit whenever an editor changes their copy, or as one of my beloved journalism profs used to put it, murders their darlings.

That last one stings a little. I’m a reporter who actually wanted to be a poet but also wanted to eat every day. I entered Journalism-capital-J through the creative-writing door, meaning I’d spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about THOSE PARTICULAR WORDS—my darlings—and when some editor came along and changed them without apparent thinking, I was not happy. I let my unhappiness be seen.

Sometimes I was right. My choice was better. But very often that editor had a deeper understanding of journalistic form and structure than I did. They definitely had a better handle on how subordinates talk to superiors in hierarchical business environments, which newsrooms definitely are. Think the Army. If instead of fighting all those changes, I had asked why they were made and tried to anticipate them next time before my copy landed on the editor’s desk, I might have learned some things and saved myself some aggravation and acrimony. I might have reached both goals AND the editors if I had been a person with more obvious humility.

Because I wasn’t actually arrogant (well mostly not). I just cared A LOT. And I didn’t fully understand the values of those editors and was too scared to ask, too scared of getting yelled at, too scared to appear like I didn’t quite know what I was doing, which I didn’t.

In my view, arrogance is an ugly Band-Aid covering fear, a fear that you don’t belong here, are out of your element, and must hide it at all costs. The cure is counter-intuitive and also scary to apply, but it works:

Just be honest when you don’t know something.

Ask questions of your superiors, whether that’s about how to do a task or how to talk to them about doing a task. Ask questions of your co-workers. Yes, let self-sufficiency be your goal—no workplace, much less a busy newsroom, loves a person who needs directions and gold stars every time they make a photocopy. But this unexpected thing can happen in a meeting, in a workplace, one-on-one when someone admits they don’t know. Someone else feels freer to admit they don’t know either. Or they can help and in helping feel a tad bit better that maybe they’re not as behind in life as they thought.

Instead of making you seem weak, it can make you seem brave. At the very least, it gives you the info/life experience/perspective you need to learn and be better, which is supposed to be the point. (And when you do care enough about something to insist on your way, people are more likely to give it to you.)

Listen, you’re spending a lot of time in two fields—academia and journalism—where KNOWING is all. In that context, it’s scary to admit you don’t know.

Do it anyway.

Another way your attitude sucks

There is another way arrogance likes to manifest in the new reporter, one that’s not a function of fear so much as eagerness.

Let me tell you how I almost got fired from my first journalism job.

I was right out of college, my first week on the job. I was wearing a skirt held up by a safety pin, and eating chip dip for dinner every night in an apartment with two pieces of furniture, and generally not winning at life.^* I wanted to be a feature writer, but I had a job with three beats and I could only write a feature if I had time after that, which I usually didn’t. On top of that cosmic injustice (to me), I had been asked to type up the obits, a grunt chore where you copied faxes (faxes!) into the computer system. Just retyping. That’s it.

Had I spent four years in journalism school and my whole life reading Byron and dreaming of literary glory to TYPE OBITS??? Oh no I had not. So with my piss-poor, one might say “arrogant,” I will kindly relabel frustrated-desire-to-do-more attitude, I typed in the obits without giving it its proper time and attention.

And I inevitably spelled one of the dead guy’s names wrong. And the editor knew that guy. And he called me into his glass-walled office to talk about my choices and my future employment and the rest I’ve blocked out because it’s just too awful.

It took me a while to come back from that mistake—the newbie reporter who couldn’t even be trusted to retype a name correctly. It took me doing a lot of small things with great love, as I think Mother Teresa once said not about arrogant reporters.

It took me admitting why I made the mistake, owning that it was all my fault, and making changes so it never happened again. It took me slowing down and attempting to take just one step at a time toward my future goals, even though I was definitely ready to have those goals right now, and maybe also a skirt that stayed up without a safety pin.

Young people hate to do that, slowing down.

You have to do it anyway.

Who do you think you are???

There are a lot of ways to mess up and make everyone hate you as a new reporter at a new job. Embracing a little humility—in the face of things you don’t understand or know how to do properly, when handed assignments you don’t want or secretly feel are beneath you—will go a looooong way toward sidestepping some of those mistakes.

When they invent time machines and I go back to talk to 22-year-old me, I will say, “Do you have to be in such a rush? Sit quietly for a second and maybe let your work speak for itself for a while. Even if your work is terrible—you don’t need to go confirming that with how you act.”

Need more opportunities to exercise humility, the opposite of arrogance, the open admission that you’re not an omnipotent journalism god?

• When someone catches you in an error, admit it without making an excuse. Apologize and offer some changes you’ll embrace to avoid making the mistake again. Watch their anger and/or the angry speech they were about to make deflate like a popped balloon.
• When someone does something you like, tell them. Great story? Tell them. Awesome idea? Tell them. This is rare currency in competitive newsrooms. (Be genuine—we’re professional BS detectors.)
• Remember, there are no boring stories, only boring reporters. Don’t use a perceived lack in the assignment, the sources, the editing to excuse your poor performance, your less-than-overwhelming effort. A great reporter could work around these things, don’t you think? Go be greater.
• P.S. I find the open admission of not knowing or not understanding something works its magic in non-newsroom settings as well. Try it out in your next class, for example—raise your hand and ask your professor to clarify a topic. Watch their little face light up with joy that someone actually cares. Or next gathering you’re at, ask someone you don’t know well to explain their obscure job to you. Actually try to listen and understand. I might have just handed you the key to human love right there.

TL; DR: There are lots of reasons you might seem arrogant and like you think your lede don’t stink to your newsroom co-workers, but the effect is all bad. Don’t look/be arrogant.

Note

* Colorful Anecdote Alert: Journalists have infamously faulty memories and don’t tend to take notes on their own experiences, which is a huge mistake. Take notes, young person! For your future hilarious newsroom memoir! But seriously, so much chip dip and sadness …

Chapter 2
I went to college with an electric typewriter, and other cautionary tales

No matter what new, newer or newest media you find yourself creating for, we all share these simple basics: extracting true stories from a big, complicated world in an effort to make that world a better place for everyone. If you want to keep doing that for the long haul, you better get ready for a technological ride.

While we’re poised in the newsroom door checking our attitudes, let me tell you this, and perhaps an old person has already mentioned it to you: We don’t feel old. At least not on the inside. In my experience, most people age along with their bodies to a certain point—maybe 19, maybe 25, and then the outside keeps going while the inside stops. The further afield those two parts grow, the more disconcerting it is when you catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror at the mall.

A 100-year-old lady said this to me once. I’m only (!!!) 45 at this writing, and it’s true for me. I think it’s just true.

Nevertheless, the outside world marches onward with your crow’s feet, and technology seems only to have accelerated or highlighted that fact. For example, I recently saw my first cell phone in a histori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Welcome and congratulations! You’ve chosen well
• 1 A is for Attitude
• 2 I went to college with an electric typewriter, and other cautionary tales
• 3 Finally we get to the important stuff
• 4 So something shiny caught your eye …
• 5 Working on your pitch (not the sports kind, sorry)
• 6 Editors have the worst ideas
• 7 Hi, stranger! The in-person approach
• 8 Can’t I just email???
• 9 The shy person’s guide to not dying inside while on assignments
• 10 Not everyone is going to like you (unreasonable but true)
• 11 All about sources
• 12 Take a flying (imaginative) leap
• 13 The all-important nutgraf
• 14 So … I’m supposed to say what to this person?
• 15 OK! Finally! Interviewing!
• 16 Journalism magic—it’s a thing!
• 17 Or maybe just shut up for a minute
• 18 Don’t rush off to lunch just yet
• 19 Yes, you still need a notebook
• 20 Don’t be a banker
• 21 Get in shape
• 22 To outline or not to outline
• 23 “I hate writing; I love having written.”—Dorothy Parker
• 24 But also … try this to love writing a little more
• 25 Get your crap together
• 26 How to tell when you’re done
• 27 A word about grammar
• 28 Developing a journalist’s conscience
• 29 The day after
• 30 Speaking of what other people think …
• 31 You did it! You’re done!
• 32 WWNBD? (What would Nellie Bly do?)
• 33 Keep your head in the game
• 34 I believe in you! Goodbye!
• Index