Spring 1995
Shark tank. Snake pit. Hornet's nest. Newsroom.
To SF State's graduating j-school class of 1995 and the eager young reporters and photographers that follow in their wake: a warning. What they don't teach you in j-school, you'll learn soon enough in the roiling quagmire that is the contemporary metropolitan newsroom.
Whether it's in the halls of a Tribune, or a Herald or a Times, whether it has an average daily circulation of 13,000 or 300,000, the politics of envy and entitlement will assault your sensibilities and attempt to eat away at your desire to "do some good and write stories that count."
Don't let it. You mustn't. What separates the truly great reporters from the hordes of clever stenographers inhabiting the nation's newsroom isn't just diligent reporting and eloquent prose, but the ability to rise above petty newsroom politics.
Hollywood often depicts newsrooms as being populated by idealistic do-gooders driven by an almost Clark-Kentian desire to right every wrong. Don't believe it.
Journalism is just another yuppie profession and the sooner you figure out newsroom politics, the better off you'll be. Does talent and tenacity count? Yes, but personality and perception are everything.
You could spend a month on a story that garners praise from all across the newsroom, but if your editor hates your guts -- or an editor you want to work for thinks you're yesterday's news -- forget about it.
Newsrooms are exercises in controlled chaos. While less free-form and much more quiet than a college paper's newsroom, they hum with brittle energy. Reporters inhabit a thermo-linguistic ground zero which produces a paper daily through legwork, paperwork, overwork and chutzpah.
I report, therefore I am. That is your motto. You may get paid by the newspaper, but you work for the public. You have a responsibility to be fair and accurate.
But if someone accuses you of being objective, slap 'em. Hard. Laser scanners are objective. Tape recorders are objective. They absorb and regurgitate information without thought. You are human; objectivity is a luxury the living can't afford.
Unfortunately, it doesn't help to pray to be brain-dead in the newsroom. You need your wits about you or nothing would ever get done...and the newsroom's craven would be on your carcass so fast, doctors would need dental x-rays to identify the body.
Lifelong friends will be found in the newsroom, those willing to open up and share their experiences and help you hone your craft. The best of friends will want to learn just as much from you and weave your perspectives into their lives.
With you, they won't be jealous or guarded or play their cards close to the vest.
Remember: the perky reporter who greets you wit the winning smile and the cheery hello could be the same person sending your death warrant via e-mail to the incredibly high-powered editor who, by the Peter Principle of Mediocrity, has ascended to a level of power which far outweighs his or her editorial talent.
As lives of quiet desperation go, these daily journalists' lives virtually simmer with pent-up desires, a morbid fear of failure and shrew-like jealousies. What these reporters want is notoriety. What they live with is obscurity.
As a reporter with the Broward Edition of the Miami Herald, I learned that nirvana wasn't some blissful state of enlightenment, it was a seat on the Dade City Desk "downtown," in the Miami Herald's main office, a burnt-yellow bunker of a building looming high above Biscayne Bay. That's where careers are made. That's where Edna Buchanan honed her craft. Where Dave Berry coaxes America's collective laugh. Where almost everyone-and-their-mother in Broward wants to be.
Up until recently, the Broward edition of the Herald used a tiered beat structure. Not one but two reporters covered some cities: one reporter for the City Desk, the other for the Hometown Herald section. A process, thankfully, now going the way of Motley Crue and acid-washed jeans.
While Hometown reporters could write stories for the City Desk, most City Desk reporters, however, would seldom stoop so low as to offer their services to the Hometown section.
I covered the city of Miramar for Hometown and, as luck would have it, I was saddled with the Herald's own sea-harpy as my comrade on the City Desk.
Here we were, two eager reporters, driven by the usual newsroom insecurities, forced to squeeze anything that barely resembled news out of a city where marriage, mortgage and reproduction were the highlights of the average working day.
A victim of misplaced ambition, my nemesis was a Herald baby. Weened off the intern-teat into Broward's newsroom upon college graduation, my Dido lived for the newsroom joust, the intercepted phone call from Miramar's City Manager and the chance -- any chance, no matter how petty and small -- to remind me of my place in the Herald pecking order.
She hoarded ideas, rarely gave suggestions, and when she did offer me pathetic news scraps, took great pains to say "this is a good story" when editors were within earshot. Like I was some kind of idiot.
I don't believe her to be malicious by nature. Rather, the thorn in my side was a product of newsroom pathology.
She watches her back. Plays her cards close to the vest. Smiles, wanly, while her fingers dance across her keyboard. She pauses, just long enough to say "Hello." Then click, click! She presses the "send" command.
These are infuriating distractions. They're the flotsam and jetsam of careers on the wane, in mid-flight, or burrowing into the newsroom floor for the long haul. They have nothing to do with reporting and writing good journalism.
They are the province of those who have lost sight of the big picture, or the greater good to which all journalists should aspire.
These days, a frigid jetstream rushes through America's newsrooms, a force that drives reporters and editors -- and their publishers -- to garner Pulitzers and other accolades. It jaundices news judgment and leeches away at the reason reporters perform this most precarious of public services, to simply help.
It feeds the frenzy of newsroom politics and to reporters and photographers it should be an anathema. Hold a steady course. Be vigilant, be yourself, but most of all, be fair. The gossip and backbiting will distract, but it mustn't drive you from journalism. In June, I will leave a full-time job and promising -- or so I've been told -- career at the Herald for an internship at Newsweek magazine in New York. It's a risk, but like an acid-laced dream, it feels both reckless and exhilarating.
As a good friend said to me when I announced my decision: "A journalist shouldn't get too comfortable." I dance on the precipice of failure and wholeheartedly agree. My colleagues and peers say Manhattan's a jungle, a place where newsroom politics is bloody, vicious and medieval. But that's OK, I tell them, I come from shark-infested waters.