Thoughts on redirecting and rejuvenating a career

I knew a lot about journalism in 1997. I was 26 years into an exciting career, enjoying a rewarding run as a reporter following success as an editor. But I’ve redirected and rejuvenated my career twice since then. Those efforts led me to opportunities and success I could not have imagined 13 years ago.

From 1997 to 2005, I consciously developed my skills, experience, connections and reputation in the field of journalism training, eventually getting a full-time job in the field. I was always interested in innovation and took steps in the mid-1990s to learn digital skills. Starting in 2006, I made digital innovation my primary pursuit and have consciously developed my digital skills, experience, connections and reputation (I still have a lot that I need to do). That pursuit led to two new jobs, first as editor of The Gazette and gazetteonline and now I’ve left the newspaper business to join a digital local news operation in the Washington metro area.

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Humanity is more important and honest than objectivity for journalists

One of journalism’s favorite notions is that we don’t become part of the story. We are supposed to be some sort of object (you know, objective) that doesn’t feel, that stays aloof and writes from an omniscient perch above it all.

It is a lie, and we need to stop repeating it. The first principle of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics is “Seek truth and report it.” Here is the truth about journalism: Journalists aren’t objects; we are people. We feel. We have families and emotions. We have moral standards. When we show up for truly personal or potentially volatile interviews or events, we become part of the story and denying that violates our obligation to tell the truth.

But the Society of Professional Journalists denied it this week, somberly cautioning journalists in Haiti: “Report the story, don’t become part of it.” As I have written before, my family became a small part of the Haiti story this month. I will address the ethics of that story shortly. But first I want to write about the underlying ethical principles. I teach ethics in journalism seminars across North America (Ottawa, Canada, and Berkeley, Calif., this month), and I know that journalists sometimes like to reduce ethics to simple do-this-don’t-do-that rules. And ethics often aren’t that simple.

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A decade’s experience in news, training, innovation

This decade is ending with much less fanfare than the past one, which was the turn of both a century and a millennium.

This decade passed without really getting a name — the Oughts didn’t quite stick, like I guess they did a century earlier (they so didn’t stick that I don’t even know or care whether Oughts or Aughts would be the preferred spelling).

If you don’t have much patience for self-indulgent reflections, this might be a good time to go read something else, because I’m going to look back on the past decade of my career.

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Newsroom horror stories

Thanks to Anthony Capps, entertainment editor at the Iowa State Daily, who found an eight-year-old training handout that apparently I never posted online. It was for a 2001 workshop I did for interns at the Omaha World-Herald on horrible mistakes and the lessons from them.

I asked colleagues at the World-Herald and elsewhere to share their stories, which they did quite eagerly. I sorted them by lessons learned. This was the forerunner to my workshops on accuracy for editors and reporters, for which the handouts are already online at No Train, No Gain (along with most of my other training handouts).

Anthony was kind enough to send me a pdf of the handout, which I have cut and pasted (with a little editing to fix mistakes that snuck past me then or to make it more appropriate for today). I promised confidentiality, so that I wouldn’t need to verify the third-person stories and so that people would feel free sharing the embarrassing first-person stories. A few people gave me permission to use their names in 2001. I have removed their names now, rather than track them down now and ask if it’s still OK to name them.

The stories and lessons are more print-centric than they would be if I were to collect stories today. But I think they still contain some valuable lessons for journalists:

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Storytellers are challenged, not limited, by Twitter and other digital tools

When I read Philip Lee’s ignorant anti-Twitter rant, Notes on the triviality of Twitter, my first reaction was that I needed to write another anti-anti-Twitter-rant rant.

But I’m getting tired of those rants (maybe you are, too). I previously noted how Leonard Pitts, Edward Wasserman and Paul Farhi wrote foolish things about Twitter without bothering to learn what they were talking about. Do I repeat myself just because Lee has echoed their whining, or could I find something new to say?

Lee did say lots of ignorant things about Twitter, but they are things I’ve addressed before, so I won’t dwell on them here. He has tried Twitter out (barely, 34 tweets in nearly a year), which the others noted above had not.

I want to address Lee’s concern about Twitter and storytelling:

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A fascinating new, old photo of China’s “tank man”

I savor every uplifting story about journalism in these difficult times.

My last post dealt, as most of my work and writing today does, with the difficult times in the news industry and in our search for solutions. Sometimes we need stories of great journalism, to fuel our fight for a prosperous future.

I read two such stories this week in the New York Times‘ Lens photojournalism blog.

First Lens recounted the stories of the four photographers who captured the moment 20 years ago when the “tank man” stopped a line of tanks attempting to quell student protests in Tiananmen Square. Their stories are filled with fascinating details about saving film from Chineese authorities, personal risk and protection and transmitting photos in the pre-Internet age.

Even more fascinating, to me, was the Lens story of Terril Jones and the photo he shot moments before the tank confrontation. The other photographs were shot from the balconies of a hotel. Jones was on the ground, fearing for his safety as the tanks approached, firing their guns. In the last shot he fired before fleeing to safety, you see a young man dashing toward the camera, his head ducked in fear. And in the distance, calm amid the uproar, you see a man with a white shirt and two bags, awaiting the oncoming tanks. It’s a compelling story, a compelling moment of premeditation and courage.

Context matters, even 20 years later.

I love hearing the stories behind great photos and these two stories remind me of some other uplifting stories about great photos or videos:

• My April post, The heart: one of journalism’s best tools, about Allan Thompson’s story in the Toronto Star, identifying the father and daughter in Nick Hughes’ horrifying video of genocide in Rwanda.
• I remember the evening Gazette photographers spent at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, explaining the stories behind some of the photos in the Year of the River exhibit of Gazette flood photography.
• National Geographic’s A Life Revealed story about the successful attempt to find the Afghan girl with the haunting green eyes, photographed by Steve McCurry in 1985, who came to symbolize the hard life of Afghan refugees. 
• One of the best stories of my career was the story of Buddy Bunker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo The Homecoming, told first in 1997 at the Omaha World-Herald and then again as a multimedia story for GazetteOnline after a home movie surfaced 65 years after the homecoming. 

Related articles by Zemanta

• Kate Adie on 20 years since Tiananmen Square (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
• A New Angle on Tiananmen Square (takepart.com)

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Journalists shouldn’t hide behind a mask

I’ll use a shortened version of this for my Monday column in The Gazette:

Mixing the personal with the professional has always been uncomfortable territory for journalists and especially for journalists’ bosses. Voicing opinions is another touchy area.

The Wall Street Journal weighed in on both matters last week with a resounding “no” to staff members who might be tempted to do either in their use of social media.

“Business and pleasure should not be mixed on services like Twitter,” a Dow Jones email guiding staff use of social media warned. The message also admonished staff: “Sharing your personal opinions, as well as expressing partisan political views … could open us to criticism that we have biases.”

The point of both rules seems to be to hide the person you are, as though reporting were a plastic Mardi Gras mask you could hold in front of your face and fool unsuspecting readers.

I was one of several bloggers and Twitterers during the past week who criticized the guidelines on various counts. I don’t want to re-plow that ground here, but I do want to address – and debunk – the notion that journalists can or should hide our humanity.

The fact is that the Wall Street Journal (as well as The Gazette and any journalism organization) already is open to criticism about biases. Readers attribute bias to us based on their own biases and based on their understanding of the fact that journalists are human and that all humans have biases.

Of course, we should maintain neutrality about topics we cover. But, as I have written here before, humanity actually helps us be better journalists. And I believe it can help build the credibility of our reporting. I will illustrate with three stories, one from the Wall Street Journal:

In the early 1990s, I was editor of the Minot Daily News (and wrote a weekly column) and my wife, Mimi, was a columnist for News. When she first started writing a column in Shawnee, Kan., before we moved to Minot, I advised Mimi that it was better to reveal occasional personal glimpses while writing about the community, and have the readers wanting to know you better, than to write frequently about yourself and have the readers feel they were getting too much personal information.

Mimi has never felt bound by my advice and pretty much ignored this counsel. She did write frequently about the community, but also dealt with our family life and her personal interests a lot (sometimes to the mild embarrassment of the husband and sons who became characters in her stories). My editor’s column did give occasional personal glimpses, but mostly wrote about lofty issues of journalism, the community or the world.

When I was fired, the publisher also dropped Mimi’s column. My firing drew some mild criticism from readers, but they were outraged to lose Mimi’s column. Four other North Dakota newspapers, whose editors were loyal readers, quickly picked up her column. Even as a columnist, I spent too much of my time behind that Mardi Gras mask, while Mimi was making a personal connection.

I covered religion for the Des Moines Register a decade ago. In addition to writing news stories, I wrote a column about faith, frequently expressing opinions or dealing with my own faith and experiences. People I interviewed frequently asked about my own faith and I answered candidly. I later learned from other religion writers that many are reluctant to discuss their own faith with people they cover and recoil at the thought of writing anything personal or opinionated.

I also wrote a lot about religion when I was at the Omaha World-Herald, but I didn’t write a column there. I’m quite sure I was accused more often of biased coverage (sometimes by people who inferred inaccurately about my own faith or opinions) in Omaha, where no one actually knew anything about my opinions or personal perspectives, than I was in Des Moines. When people knew we held different opinions or came from different faiths, I frequently heard appreciation for my fair and unbiased coverage.

Now for the Wall Street Journal example: In 2004, Farnaz Fassihi, a reporter in the Journal’s Baghdad bureau, sent an email to friends about her life in Baghdad. “Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest,” she started. What followed was detailed, well-written and candid, describing how difficult and dangerous work and life in Baghdad were then, one of the most chaotic times of the war in Iraq.

Someone posted the email online and it became an immediate sensation. Critics of the Journal questioned how she could continue reporting on the war. But others noted that the blunt assessment gave a more accurate account of life in Baghdad than the stories she wrote behind her mask for the Journal’s news columns.

Journalists are people. We can acknowledge our humanity and still uphold the principles of accuracy, independence and fairness. Sometimes showing our humanity helps build our credibility. People stop wondering who that is behind the mask.

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Avoiding ethical conflicts in small towns

How do small-town journalists maintain credibility while covering public officials who may be their family and friends?

Matt Baron, a friend who works as a freelance journalist, journalism trainer and public relations consultant in Oak Park, Ill., passed that question along to me after a journalist facing that situation posed it at a recent workshop.

I answered that this was not necessarily a small-town problem: When I was a reporter at the Omaha World-Herald and my son, Mike, was press secretary for Sen. Chuck Hagel, I had to discuss with my editors when and how to keep a proper distance from the senator. But small-town journalists certainly deal more often with that uncomfortable matter of covering people with whom they have personal relationships.

This situation is addressed squarely in the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics. One of the core principles is: “Act Independently: Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public’s right to know.”

The seven bullets that elaborate deal with accepting gifts or special treatment but don’t specifically address this question of close relationships. A couple points offer guidance, though: “Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived” and “Disclose unavoidable conflicts.” A third point underscores that associations are important, but isn’t particularly helpful in dealing with family relationships: “Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.” You can’t remain free of relatives and you can’t control their activities.

Bob Steele’s 10 questions to guide ethical decisions also provide some guidance, but don’t address this specific issue. Question 7 (“How would I feel if I were in the shoes of one of the stakeholders?”) is a good one. How would you feel if you were reading a story written by someone you knew had a close relationship to a source? Questions 9 (what are alternatives?) and 10 (how can you justify your decision to the public?) are helpful, too.

My response is that you need to employ some combination of three factors:

• Full disclosure to your editors.
• Proper distance from the source.
• Transparency with the public.

The right combination of these factors will vary with the situation. My view is that you always disclose any potential conflict (or appearance of conflict) to your editors. This way you turn every decision into a collaboration. In Omaha, I didn’t always agree with my editors’ decisions, but discussing and disagreeing is a better situation than failing to disclose and being accused of unethical behavior.

Of course, no transparency with your audience is needed if you decide the proper distance is for you not to cover stories that deal in any way with a particular person because of the close relationship.

From 2000 to 2005, I was a reporter for the Omaha World-Herald. For all but one year of that stretch, my son Mike worked for Hagel, initially as a press aide, then as press secretary and later as communication director. He eventually became Hagel’s chief of staff, though I had left the World-Herald by then.

The World-Herald had an outstanding political reporter, Dave Kotok (now the managing editor), and usually Dave and our Washington reporters covered Hagel. But I was the national correspondent, which meant that I could be called on to help with political coverage and that I would cover some national issues that could involve Hagel.

It’s good to anticipate these issues and discuss them in general terms before a particular story presents a problem (which may need a swift decision). My editors and I discussed the situation as soon as Mike went to work with Hagel. We decided I shouldn’t write stories that were primarily about Hagel or where Hagel was a primary source.

If I was reporting a story and it seemed like we should have a Hagel comment as a minor element of the story, we decided I could go ahead and handle that. In those cases, I would arrange any interviews through someone else in the press office, rather than calling Mike.

I also informed my editors of my deal with Mike: All discussions between us were off the record, but if I heard something I wanted to pass along to a colleague, I would ask him for permission and abide by his response. (I did frequently hear news from Mike that I wished we could publish in the World-Herald, but abided by his wishes to keep it off the record.)

This worked fairly well. I seldom dealt with Hagel. But I should add that efforts to keep personal relationships at arm’s length sometimes don’t work out the way you plan. I might arrange an interview through someone else in the press office and plan to keep everything professional, but when Hagel, a gregarious man, came on the phone, he would invariably start the conversation with some flattering remark about my son or some teasing remark about trying to straighten my kid out. So much for arm’s length.

After the 9/11 attacks, much of my work for the next few years focused on the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Center for Afghanistan Studies and its involvement in Afghanistan, both historically and in assisting the Karzai government. This story fit neatly into my beat and it mostly wasn’t about Hagel. But Hagel served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was heavily involved in Afghan affairs and UNO’s role there. I could argue that by steering away from Hagel stories for ethical reasons (I did alert the Washington bureau to some), I undercovered his role in an important local story. Which approach would serve the public better: Keeping my distance from Hagel or accurately reflecting the local senator’s involvement in an important issue?

When President Bush came to Omaha to tout some program he had just announced, I agreed to my editors’ request to be the primary rewrite person for the story, compiling feeds from various reporters at the scene into a single story. Only later, when I realized that Hagel had traveled to Omaha with the president (with Mike accompanying him) and appeared with the president at the rally, did I realize I should have suggested someone else for rewrite duty. I did balk at any involvement in covering future visits to Omaha by President Bush.

My editors had less problem than I did with my involvement in covering Hagel. They said they trusted my integrity. I said I appreciated that, but I didn’t like the appearance (remember the SPJ’s admonition to avoid “real or perceived” conflicts). During the 2004 campaign, Hagel (despite considerable friction with Bush) served as co-chair of Bush’s Nebraska campaign and I said I should avoid coverage of Bush campaign visits. My editors respected that.

Then one Friday, I got a request from the bosses: They would be short-handed Monday and Bush was going to be campaigning in Des Moines. Could I cover that, since Hagel wouldn’t be accompanying him there? Sure, I said. Only later did I learn that Hagel (then considering a 2008 presidential run, so he no doubt was trying to build some Iowa contacts) would spend the weekend campaigning in Iowa, accompanied by Mike. (Parents frequently don’t know about their adult children’s business travels.) I covered Bush in Des Moines (Hagel was not there) but then told my editors that I simply needed to stop covering him, period. They again expressed their trust in my integrity, but agreed to honor my wishes on Bush coverage.

In retrospect, I think I should have insisted more firmly earlier on greater distance from coverage dealing with Hagel. Mike and I share a distinctive last name and lots of people in the Omaha area knew he was my son. I also suggested a few times that an editor’s note should disclose the relationship and my editors always thought no note was necessary. These aren’t black-and-white calls where I can say I was right and they were wrong, but I favor greater transparency than they did.

The situation that the reporter described in raising the issue with Matt Baron was similar but perhaps more difficult to work around: The reporter in a small town was covering a government body where his uncle was an elected official. Sometimes in a small town, you can’t just assign someone else, as we could at the World-Herald.

Sometimes in a small town, you don’t even know about conflicts. In the 1970s I covered city government in Shenandoah, Iowa, where my father had been a pastor (he had moved away by the time of the incident in question). Some clients and employees of an agency that helped underprivileged people complained at a city council meeting about the management approach of two board members of the agency, which received some city money (or might have used city property; for some reason these people came to the council). I reported on the complaints, angering at least one of the board members.

Only later did I learn from my father that he had served on the agency’s board when he was in town and had disagreements with the same two board members over some of the exact same issues they raised a few years later with the city council. Ignorant of Dad’s involvement (what teen-ager pays attention to his parents’ civic activities?), I could not have avoided the conflict. But I’m sure the angry board member thought Dad’s involvement in the board skewed my coverage of the controversy.

My advice to journalists who have to cover news that involves relatives (or close friends): Rearrange assignments when you can. Disclose potential conflicts to the public when you can’t avoid them. Invite public feedback on all content, so that any accusations about favoritism will be made directly to you in story comments or letters to the editor. This way you can address the issue directly rather than have it circulate unchallenged in local gossip.

I deal more with issues of independence in this handout from my ethics seminars.

Do you have other advice to offer for Matt’s friend and his ethical dilemma?

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