Read the Introduction:
"This is a book about how to create good journalism, and perhaps
even great journalism. One author, Mike Wallace, is one
of
experience as a reporter and anchorman. He has won nearly
every prize a television journalist can receive, including twenty one
Emmy Awards, most of them for his work on CBS News'
60 Minutes. The other author, Beth Knobel, is an award-winning
reporter turned journalism educator whose experience in
newspapers, radio, and television stretches back nearly thirty
years. The journalist and the journalism professor are teaming
up in this book to unlock the mysteries of our profession, in
the hope that our stories and advice will be useful to the next
generation of journalists.
In doing so, we realize that this is a particularly difficult
time to be starting out in journalism. As we write this, the
news business is in terrible shape. Newspapers and magazines
are folding in droves as their costs start to outstrip their revenues.
Almost every print publication is shrinking, because fewer
and fewer readers are willing to pay for something they can
get for free on the Internet. Network television, too, is attracting
fewer and fewer viewers to its news programs. Not only are
there few new jobs in traditional journalism these days, but
the number of jobs overall has continued to fall—thousands
of journalists have lost their jobs in recent months. This creates
an extremely difficult situation for all reporters, but for young
journalists in particular.
This state of affairs makes the need for this book more urgent,
not less. Young journalists will need all the knowledge
and skills they can get to compete in this tough market. Journalists
who are starting out will need to show that they know
the best practices in the business, in terms of both skills and
knowledge. And even as the media landscape changes and the
Internet comes to dominate other media, the journalists who
will be working in the twenty-first century will benefit from
the fundamentals we recommend in this book. The medium
may change, but the essentials of quality journalism remain
the same. “Adapting to change will challenge us all,” says Marcus
Brauchli, executive editor of the Washington Post. "But the
fundamentals of journalism will continue to matter whatever
shape the new information ecosystem takes.”
As much as the media landscape may be changing, there
will always be a need for good journalism. It’s one of the pillars
on which our country has been built. The founding fathers
knew it. “Were it left to me to decide whether we should
have a government without newspapers or newspapers without
a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer
the latter,” Thomas Jefferson said all the way back in 1787.
And today’s leaders know it. “Your ultimate success as an
industry is essential to the success of our democracy,” President
Obama declared at the 2009 White House Correspondents’
Dinner, addressing a roomful of the country’s top journalists.
“You help all of us who serve at the plea sure of the American
people do our jobs better by holding us accountable, by demanding
honesty, by preventing us from taking shortcuts and
falling into easy political games that people are so desperately
weary of.”
You can point to literally millions of examples of courageous
journalists uncovering wrongdoing, bringing useful news into
the public eye, or otherwise changing lives for the better. The
father of American broadcast journalism, the CBS News correspondent
Edward R. Murrow, helped bring down a senator
who was destroying innocent people’s lives by accusing
them of being communists. He exposed and tried to end the
exploitation of underpaid farm workers. He lobbied for civil
rights. The late, great Walter Cronkite, whom we’ll discuss
later in the book, effectively helped to end the Vietnam War
when he said, after a reporting trip there in 1968, that the
war was unwinnable. Just a few years later, two metro reporters
at the Washington Post covered a little break-in at the
Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate
Hotel, and the ensuing story brought down a president.
These are a few of the larger moments of American journalism
history, yet smaller but still crucially important stories are
broken every single day. Multiply that by every country in the
world and you get an idea of how important the press can be.
Despite the current economic challenges, history suggests
that journalism is unlikely to disappear. During the past hundred
years or so, every time a new communications medium
has been introduced, people thought it would destroy journalism.
When radio first became a mass medium, people thought
it would kill off good newspaper reporting. When television
came along, people thought it would make both newspapers
and radio obsolete. Now, with the changes being wrought by
the Internet, many people wonder if journalism can survive.
We are absolutely certain that it can. And it must. The fact that
applications to journalism schools and programs are increasing
tells us that young people haven’t yet been scared off.
Still, each of those paradigm shifts presented new challenges
for journalists, and the period we’re living through is
no exception. The problems journalism now faces aren’t just
financial—they’re structural. The Internet makes it easy to
disseminate information, but it doesn’t necessarily make the
information disseminated true or trustworthy. The Internet
makes it all too easy to rewrite existing articles instead of doing
original work. With the advent of blogging, people’s own musings
sometimes take precedence over real reporting. In all forms
of media, gossip is often being reported as fact, and substance
sometimes takes a backseat to sensation. The overall discourse
has become shorter and more superficial.
Although Mike and Beth are two generations apart, our
view of journalism is essentially the same. We both see journalism
as a tool to educate, not just titillate. We both think
that journalists have to break new ground in order to have
done their job right. We both think that journalists have a
responsibility to tell their audience what they need to know,
not just what they want to know. We both think journalists
have a special responsibility, more than ever before, to help
people make sense of complicated and controversial issues.
These statements may sound self-evident to anyone who’s
ever worked as a reporter or editor, but our rather old-fashioned
view of journalism is worth emphasizing in today’s climate. In
these pages, we’ll try to explain to young journalists how to
create what we consider to be great journalism—reports with
both dramatic heat and informational light. That is to say, we
hope to explain how to create journalism that is not just dramatic
but also informed, knowledgeable, and groundbreaking—like
the journalism we’ve aspired to create in our careers.
What we’ve tried to do here is to produce a book that
explains the profession of journalism to students and young
reporters, but which isn’t a textbook. Textbooks, while instructive,
are difficult to sit down and read. Journalism needs a manifesto
right now to set young journalists on the right path, and
we hope that this is it.
We hope that the stories, lessons, and thoughts contained
in these pages will help inspire young journalists to carry
the torch as it should be carried—and give them the basic
skills they need to get started. We cannot say that we know
everything there is to know about this profession, or that we’ve
always been perfect journalists ourselves. But our decades of
work and those of our friends have provided some good stories
and useful lessons."
Copyright 2010 by Mike Wallace and Beth Knobel