Voices
Three Stories a Day?
How Young Reporters Learn to Skim
The story description I’d sent my editor earlier in the day sounded interesting enough: “Two months after the school committee’s controversial decision to charge students to ride the bus to school, no one has paid a bus fee in Peabody, and parents are confused.”
The trouble was that at noon, four hours before deadline at the small Massachusetts daily paper where I work, the last part of my pitch was still pure speculation. I assumed parents were confused. I saw no reason why they wouldn’t be, but I had yet to speak to a single parent, confused or otherwise.
Four hours should have been plenty of time to rectify that problem. After all, I had a list of more than a dozen parents affected by the bus fee, many of whom had spoken at a public meeting several weeks earlier and so were sure to have strong opinions on the issue. I’d spoken to several of the parents more than once, and had built relationships with them that made me confident they would talk on the record. And if all that failed, I knew the neighborhoods most affected by the bus fee — I could just knock on doors.
But the bus-fee story wasn’t the only one I was working on that day. In fact, it wasn’t even the most important. I had a page-one story analyzing the previous day’s school committee election that had to be written, and I was only about halfway through my list of people to call for that story. And once I was done with that one, I had to write yet another story to help fill the inside of the paper. It didn’t have to be long, but it had to be done, and since I hadn’t yet decided what I would write about, it was sure to take at least an hour or two. Those four hours suddenly seemed very short indeed.
This was my problem, of course, not yours. But, on second thought, maybe it’s yours, too.
It’s a problem familiar to almost anyone who has worked at a small daily: too many stories, not enough time. My paper is hardly the worst example. The Salem News, where I work, is owned by the Eagle-Tribune Publishing Company. Twice the size of the News, the Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence has been owned by the same family since 1898. The News has a larger editorial staff than many small dailies, and has even been adding reporters at a time when many papers have been cutting back. The paper’s experienced editors understand and value good journalism, and they know that it takes time and money to produce. Eagle-Tribune Publishing has devoted substantial resources to The Salem News since it bought it two years ago.
But Salem News reporters, like those at other small papers, are responsible for filing two or three stories every day, a pace that inevitably puts more emphasis on efficiency than on depth.
The most obvious impact of that frantic pace is that it leaves little time for digging. As a result, reporters rarely learn about issues — budget crises, building delays, town hall cronyism — until someone else makes them public.
Perhaps more significant, the demand for stories not only affects what stories we write, but how we write them. When deadline looms, the story tends to be shaped by whoever returns phone calls — and that is hardly determined at random. In the case of the bus-fee story, I spoke to the school transportation director, who picked up her phone; the school business manager, who called back shortly after I left him a message; and two members of the school committee, both of whom had given me their cell-phone numbers — all in the course of an hour.
Parents? In most cases I had home numbers, not very useful in the middle of the day when many of them were at work. Even work numbers are of limited use, since for most parents, “Ben from The Salem News called, something about busing” doesn’t translate into “skip your lunch break so he can meet deadline.”
In the end, none of the parents I called got back to me before deadline (one called back the next day, another the following week when she returned from a business trip). The story became school administrators explain fee delays, not a bad story, exactly, just one lacking the human touch I’d planned.
The bus-fee story is hardly an isolated example. Officials — mayors, school superintendents, city council members, and aldermen — call back because it is part of their job to do so. They know that they can use the press to get their positions out, and they know that prompt replies give them more control over the shape a story ultimately takes. Large institutions often go the elected officials one better by having public relations directors return reporters’ calls.
The rest of the world — parents, taxpayers, union members, students — don’t have p.r. firms and they don’t have time in their days set aside to field press inquiries. Giving out home numbers, work numbers, and cell-phone numbers to the press seems to them a sacrifice of privacy, not a way to make sure their voices get heard.
The result is predictable: large institutions, which already have so many ways to control the news, end up getting their positions heard, while the public gets pushed to the side.
Of course, all newspapers, large and small, face this same reality. But the impact is intensified at smaller papers, where reporters have less time to chase down elusive sources. Almost every small-paper reporter I’ve spoken to has a list of stories to do when there’s time; stories on that list tend to stay there for months, if not forever.
None of this is to say good journalism doesn’t happen at small papers. It does, especially at papers like mine where the publisher realizes that good journalism sells. When big stories break, The Salem News’s editors routinely give reporters time to work on them, and encourage reporters to dig beneath the surface. And on a day-to-day basis, small papers cover stories larger papers miss or ignore.
But small-paper reporters must also rush from story to story, rarely taking the time to dig beneath the surface unless it’s major. In fact, it would be virtually impossible to dig deep on every article; reporters quickly learn to get less important stories done as quickly as possible so that they can focus on the ones that run up front.
Young reporters in this country are told that the best place to get their start is at a small paper, and this is undoubtedly the case. At small papers, even the most junior reporter is given a chance to cover a beat, develop sources, and write everything from breaking news to off-beat features. At most small papers, everyone writes for page one, everyone gets to work on major stories, and everyone gets the kind of personal attention from editors that young writers need to succeed.
It would be comforting to think that when I leave The Salem News and move to a larger paper, I will bring with me only the skills I’ve learned, and not the bad habits. And once I finally have time to do every story well, I’ll abandon the one-phone-call story and return to the kind of skeptical, bone-deep reporting I always envisioned myself doing.
Maybe I will. If I do, it will be a credit to my editors in Salem, who regularly push reporters to overcome the limits of time and resources. But I can’t escape the feeling that all the habits I’m learning now — the bad as well as the good — are here to stay.
It’s a sobering thought. Small papers across the country are teeming with ambitious young reporters hoping one day to make the leap to major dailies. The ones who succeed are the ones who best learn the lessons those small papers teach. The question is, what lessons are they learning?
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