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Write Hard, Die Free {musings}

This pin.

When I was a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star, I was gifted one of these by an editor. 

I came across it again today and I stopped.

I wrote about 5-6 stories on half of a suburban/rural county north of Kansas City every day as part of my “fellowship.”

I smoked too many cigarettes, stayed up too late and lived off sauteed spinach and spaghetti. Sometimes ramen. I made about $25,000 a year. My credit card regularly paid for groceries.

This is where I started.

Today, I make a slightly better living and have learned to cook other things on the cheap. I quit smoking (unless I’m out or stressed) over 4 years ago. I rarely write stories.

But I’m still a journalist.

I dropped in on a class at USC yesterday and I looked at the students, a couple of whom I knew.

I want to tell you this:

You will work too hard. You will no be paid enough. You will get yelled at, doors slammed in your face. You will stand on the side of the road next to a terrible accident in heels until your feet go numb from throbbing. You will never forget that accident.

You will write stories you hate, and your editor will kill the only sentence you like in that story.

But it will be worth it, I promise.

The sleepless nights, the carpal tunnel, the lack of a social life outside the newsroom, it’s worth it.

One day, you will look up and realize you’ve done this for six years and you have never stopped loving it. You will be tired, your shoulders will ache and you will only be thinking about the story. Today’s story. Today’s experiment.

Journalism will beat you up and leave you by the side of a road, but it will come back for you a few hours later, with the promise of a story so good that you’ve got to hear it. A tweet so heartfelt that you might cry. It will hand you a project that is so awe-inspiring that you will work on it until you fall asleep on your laptop.

I still love spinach. I still don’t make enough. I could leave this industry — and I did — and get paid twice as much. But I came back to it.

I will always write hard. And I know because of that, i will die free.

The Value of Listening

(I was recently asked at work to write about the value of social media and blogging. Somehow, it became a blog post. So here it is)
I recently gave a couple of talks around Los Angeles focusing on blogging and social media at the station.

Without intention, my theme quickly became listening.

News outlets are used to talking. We’re used to telling people the news through their medium and informing their day. We wake them up, tell them what happened around town and send them off on their day with a banana and a coffee. We let them talk back, maybe through certain outlets like the editorial page or in online comments, but we rarely responded.

It’s a monologue. Not a dialogue.

Now, we’re getting push back. We’re seeing blogs popping up and friends informing each other through Facebook and Twitter. No longer can we be the center of the world.

It’s important to engage. It’s important that we take the conversations we are already having to the next level. The public is demanding that we speak to them. They’re throwing the coffee in our faces, and telling us that Suzy down the street told them differently.

Stalking the conversation
Follow the conversation to where it is. If it is on street corners, we should be there.

We can no longer afford to silo conversations in one area. We must seek out our audience and join them where they are — Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare, wherever.

Not always our show
Through social media, we have to accept that we are walking into someone elses’ dinner party and listening to the conversation.

NPR’s Andy Carvin is frequently quoted as saying that NPR’s Facebook page was successful because NPR remembers that the page is on Facebook. It’s not their party to run. They’re just there as a conduit, to moderate.

Yet, realizing our influence
When we give tours of the station, people are enamored and thrilled at the chance to see us at work.

We have to remember that regardless of how menial we think our jobs and stories seem, they can be the world to someone. We wake them up in the morning, we keep people company during slow hours at work, quiet nights and sometimes on their commutes.

Whether we like it or not, we are important and we are strong voices in people’s lives. We must live up to that. We must let them in and remind them that this is not a one-way relationship. We need them as much as they need us.

Back to listening
At the end of the day, we should do all of these things. But we should listen first.

Listen to your community and what they want and need from you. Respond to them. Then speak.

It takes a minute, but it’s also un-training what we’ve done for so long.

Asking more of our teachers (and students)

(This post is a part of the lovely new and improved Carnival of Journalism!)

I did not begin my love affair with journalism in high school. It did not even begin when I switched majors to journalism. It began the day I walked into a student newsroom at Iowa State University. It began the day I met a fellow student who gave me a story and told me to kick ass at it.

I like to tell people that I never left the newsroom after that.

But things are different now. 

We ask more and more of our reporters and students are increasingly told to know everything. They are caught between learning how to write, report, tweet, edit video and more.

I feel for students these days. But I also know that those requests for more knowledge come from this: We need journalists with a sense of experimentation.

The fearlessness that comes with trying new things and potentially failing is difficult to teach.

We can’t shy away from changing journalism education in a way that accepts digital knowledge and the spirit of experimentation. But instead of embracing the change, schools are running from it. This disappoints me. 

In an article for Inside Higher Education, Michael Bugeja, the director of the school I graduated from, wrote this:

“Our budget is slim, and our curriculums even slimmer. We don’t teach entrepreneurialism; we practice it with year-round apprenticeships and outsourcing services. Our graduates understand what technology can, should not and must never do. But I worry about their future because educators and foundations keep touting technology without assessing it. Doing so will tell a sad narrative of failure to monetize large-scale news operations.”

How is this acceptable?

Bugeja seems to say it’s OK that Iowa State isn’t teaching entrepreneurialism and instead relying on others to teach their students how to march forward into a new kind of journalism. Shouldn’t the university teach in conjunction with other programs? Journalism isn’t taught in silos.

Furthermore, Bugeja’s argument for journalism programs treading carefully into technology seems to be founded on an intense underestimation of our audience.

“Journalism used to focus on what citizens needed to know, whether they liked it or not. Now it focuses on what the audience wants, explaining the spike in celebrity and entertainment news.”

We are not here to be the dictators of what is important. And I’d like to believe our audience is not only interested in Paris Hilton.

What journalism does best is add context to what is happening and facilitate the conversation around it. The highlight of the troubles in journalism is that we are getting back to our roots. Journalism is based on conversation and we are just moving that conversation online.

It does sound suspiciously like marketing. And that should not be a bad thing. There should be absolutely not shame in teaching students to promote their work. There should never be shame in telling people, “I wrote a damn good story today.”

So what do we do?

We need to challenge educators and programs. We need to bend the rules of what we think of as journalism. Programs that reflect what we worked on even in 1995 doesn’t cut it anymore. Students should learn a little business, a little marketing, a little PR.

Let’s stop teaching students that they are the ultimate source of information as journalists. Let’s teach them that their ultimate goal is to learn from the audience as well as their sources. Let’s teach them to talk to the audience that they are working for.

Let’s work with start-ups, the business school, newsrooms and beyond to have students understand why storytelling is the most important skill you have as a journalist — but not the only one necessary to survive.

Yes, it’s a lot to ask of journalism programs. But if we’re asking so much of our students, shouldn’t we ask that much of our teachers?