When we first meet Carl Bernstein (as portrayed by Dustin Hoffman) in the opening minutes of “All the President’s Men,” he’s a shambles. Shaggy hair, tieless, frayed shirt collar, unbelted jeans, tennis shoes, constant cigarette, one of hundreds of bodies in the vast Washington Post newsroom of the early 1970s.

He’s only 28, but he’s been in the newspaper business since he was 16 — and seems to have stagnated. He’s covering boring stories that he doesn’t finish. He’s likely to be fired. Then comes the biggest opportunity of his life.

In the first fragmented hours of what would come to be known as Watergate, Bernstein senses something, and his street-honed instincts are unerring. Like a predator catching the faint whiff of big prey, he hangs around the edge of the story until he insinuates himself into the middle of it. Almost predictably, Bernstein soon finds himself at the epicenter of events.

None of this was accidental.

As we learn in Bernstein’s 2022 memoir “Chasing History, a Kid in the Newsroom,” recently released in paperback, his formative years as a working journalist who wasn’t old enough to drink or vote prepared him for the challenges of covering Watergate. In fact, he was perfectly suited for it.

“Chasing History” is, after you sort through the personal chatter that’s to be expected from a recounting of one’s teen years, a primer on how to be a reporter. Then and now. The basics haven’t changed, and no one practiced them more with more intent than the young Carl Bernstein, who finagled his way into the Washington Star newsroom the same way a lot of aspiring journalists did: as a copy boy.

From day one, he never accepted that was his destiny. Everything he did at the Star was aimed, even calculated, at becoming a reporter. He did it the old-fashioned way, by not only seizing opportunities when he saw them, but creating them. He assumed that every duty, however menial, was a learning moment; that every conversation inside or outside the newsroom could be used to expand his knowledge.

Imagine doing that, essentially full-time, while you’re still bumping your way through high school, as did Bernstein — who admits that his graduation was borderline miraculous. Bernstein also flunked out of college, but that didn’t matter.

He was a master student of the craft of journalism at a time when the technology of journalism was essentially the same as it had been for decades. No computers, no cell phones, no internet search engines. It was still the era of manual typewriters, carbon paper, hot lead and pockets full of change for pay phones.

Reporting wisdom that hasn't changed

But the job itself was the same as it is now, and how Bernstein went about it is instructive more than 60 years later. Here are some lessons to be gleaned from “Chasing History:”

• “I’ll work the phones.” So says the film version of Bernstein to get himself attached to the Watergate story. It was something he was good at. As one of The Washington Post editors explains in justifying Bernstein’s potential value to the story: “He knows people.” Indeed, “Chasing History” is all about knowing people, building and maintaining relationships, cultivating connections and sources, and keeping them active in the prehistoric version of The Cloud that we knew back in the day as a Rolodex. Bernstein capitalized on dozens of acquaintances — some of them longstanding, others tenuous, all of them catalogued for future use.
• Behaving as if. From the first time he hung a Washington Star ID card around his neck, Bernstein acted like he was entitled to go wherever any other reporter could go and talk to anyone who could be a potential source. He slipped into a few places he probably shouldn’t have been allowed, but he didn’t force or fake his way in or pretend to be something he wasn’t.
• Getting it right. Bernstein had it pounded into him by hard-shelled editors who expected no less from him than from any other reporter. Check, double check, triple check, whether it’s three paragraphs or 30. He immersed himself in detail, making use of all his senses to record the experience.
• Absorbing wisdom. Bernstein figured out who he could learn from and latched on, asking questions, seeking guidance, offering assistance. He wasn’t a sycophant, but an eager and attentive student, tagging along with veterans and volunteering to help with just about anything. After a while, he didn’t have to volunteer: he got assigned.
• It’s all back story. Pre-Google, when newspaper archives were thousands of clippings filed in a news library (“the morgue”), Bernstein learned the system and worked it relentlessly. He pulled hundreds of stories, recent and ancient, to educate himself on what had been written, cross-referencing as he went. It was time-consuming, but it made him a better-prepared reporter.
• Everything is interesting. Bernstein’s curiosity was boundless. If something caught his attention, he would find out more, hit the news library, talk to people he knew. Go where others might not; seek out the stories that go under-noticed.
• Write it down. Not only was Bernstein a prodigious note-taker, he was also a hoarder. He kept boxes of notes and newspaper clippings and took them with him when he moved. There’s a telling scene in the “All The President’s Men” when Bernstein is interviewing a reluctant witness in her home and resorts to scribbling notes on napkins, matchbook covers and random scraps of paper while drinking enough coffee to float an aircraft carrier.
• Be ready. When the teen-age Bernstein was assigned to cover the historic Martin Luther King Jr. march in Washington, D.C., or John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, he planned well in advance, knew where he needed to be — and where the phone booths were so he could call in constant updates to the rewrite desk. He took every assignment he was handed or could cajole, worked long hours — which made him a poor student in high school and during his brief foray into college but piled up his frequent reporter miles.
• Use your skills. Bernstein was an extraordinarily fast and accurate typist, which served him well taking dictation from reporters in the field — and helped impress his bosses.
• Know what’s going on. Bernstein read all the daily newspapers that came into the Star office every day, to see how others were covering stories (especially the competition in the nation’s capital).
• Just one more. Bernstein asked the extra question, or asked the interviewee who else he should talk to. Extending an interview by even a minute can produce big dividends.
• Don’t accept dead ends. Young Bernstein encountered a few, and he and Bob Woodward hit a lot of them trying to get to the guts of Watergate. Their movie boss, Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee, didn’t have a lot of sympathy. “You think bitching about it is going to get the story where we want it?” he snarled. They were out of his office in a heartbeat.

A reported memoir

“Chasing History” could just well be called “Colliding With History.” It’s not so much memoir as detailed chronology with intent, a straight-line story covering just a few years full of growth, learning, decisions and twists of fate that eventually put him in The Washington Post newsroom — where he ran smack into history again. For Bernstein, the early 1960s were the perfect nexus of nexus of personality, ambition and events.

A reader may wonder how Bernstein could recall so much detail so many years. He apparently kept a lot of those old notebooks. But it’s also clear from the “acknowledgements” chapter at the end of the volume that he thoroughly re-reported his own life by contacting as many of the original resources as he could and plumbing their recollections as well. “Chasing History” stands not only as a revealing story of the making of a journalist, but also as an example of all the attributes that made Bernstein the reporter he became.

* * *

Don Nelson is editor of the weekly Methow Valley News in north-central Washington state. He has more than 40 years of experience in newspapers and magazines.

The post The making of a (born) journalist appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]T[/dc]he director wasn’t satisfied.

“Do it again,” she said, after we finished the scene.

We did.

“Do it again.”

We did.

“Do it again.”

And so on, until we got it right. Or close enough.

It was my first acting experience at our local community theater (as Sir Toby Belch in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”). I stepped onto the stage directly from my newspaper office, where I am the owner/publisher/editor/part-time reporter/sometime photographer of a small weekly in a rural outpost. I’m not used to being told what to do.

But trying my hand at acting was a long-delayed dream, so I accepted that I would be dragged out of my comfort zone. What I didn’t expect were all the connections I saw between the theater world and the newsroom world. Those connections became more clear as I progressed to other acting roles and then to directing a play on my own. Bonus: The parallels between how a director guides a play, and how an editor guides a story, have been useful to me as a journalist.

In a play, as in a complicated story, it’s all about structure, continuity, character development and a clearly defined story line. The journey from Act I, Scene I, to the curtain is comparable to the arc from a story’s lead through the final graph. It’s the director’s responsibility, and the editor’s, to keep the story moving with credibility and authority, and not to lose the audience along the way. And you really have to be paying attention to everything to do that, whether directing or editing.

I paid close attention to the director. She’s an accomplished actress, playwright and university-level drama teacher, so she knows her stuff. As a novice actor, I needed to trust her. As an aspiring stage director, I wanted to learn from her. It was a bonus that I was able to take lessons I learned in the back to the newsroom.

Seeing the big picture

It’s the stage director’s challenge — in partnership with the actors and backstage crew — to lift thousands of words off flat pages and turn them into a full-blooded, live, three-dimensional series of moments that feel real to the audience.

The “Twelfth Night” director had a well-formed vision of how the play should unfold, where we should be, how the characters should look, speak and behave. To that end, she was uniformly demanding of everyone, no matter how large or small the part. Consistent standards matter in theater  — and in journalism.

But it was all instructive, with an outcome in mind: the sooner you got it right, the sooner you moved on. Sometimes the actors aren’t nailing it. When that happens, you can’t get frustrated. You have to help them. A play is an ensemble effort that requires as much rigorous teamwork, attention to detail and commitment to excellence as anything I’ve done.

A complicated story requires no less. The same elements are necessary: planning, persistence, teamwork and mutual support, coordination, motivation, story structure, revisions upon revisions (“do it again”). The story emerges in print with a byline and perhaps photo credits. That’s what the reader sees. But anyone who’s been through the process knows that the people in the background made it happen with their expertise and support.

Detail, detail, detail

Nothing about a play is random. Every prop, furniture placement, lighting change, sound effect or costume has been carefully designed to complement the production. That elaborate setting is created by a lot of other people for the sake of the actors, before they ever enter stage left, and to set a mood and focus the attention of the audience.

Each movement is precisely choreographed (the theater term is “blocking”). A nuanced eyebrow lift, a slight turn, a seemingly clumsy collision with the furniture — all of it is calculated and intentional, and meant to be identically recreated performance after performance.

To stand the test of time, a major story must be thought of in the same way: It should establish a sense of place and social context the same way a stage set does. This is where the time-honored directive to writers and editors is imperative: Show, don’t tell.

Getting there

My first acting experience was followed by other roles, and then by directing a short play. Finally, I felt ready to guide a complicated, full-length play called “Rope.” (The 1948 movie version, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is a must-see for Hitchcock fans, or anyone fascinated by film.)

Directing a play forces you to think about sequencing. Everything happens for a reason, and leads to the next thing. I learned when I was directing “Rope” that when I was blocking, I basically had to start at the end of a scene and work back to the beginning to get the movements right. The question was always, “how did they get here, and why?”

An effective story must answer that same question.

To address that question on stage, you have to understand the full story, the characters’ motivations, and their actions in relationship to each other. I was moving eight people around the stage for 90 minutes. At one point, they were all drinking actual liquids and eating real food. There were fight scenes that had to look genuine without anyone getting hurt. It helped that I also designed the set, with all those required movements very much in mind. Furniture can facilitate or clutter.

Think of a story’s literary embellishments in the same way. Do they enhance or distract?

Back story (called “exposition” in theater or the movies) is tricky in print and on stage. In the theater, it’s achieved through dialog. In a story, the editor has to look for places where fleshing out the past doesn’t bog down the narrative.

Some assembly is required

A play is “chaptered” into scenes to help us follow the action in segments. In the theater, all these elements merge to create a collective experience that the audience shares — and that is faithfully reproduced every night of the show. And isn’t that what a well-crafted article does?

Like good journalism, good drama takes time. Rehearsals go on for weeks. To make it bearable, directors break the play down into manageable blocks, say six to 12 pages of script at a time. Some nights, all we did was work on one block (“do it again”) until we felt good about it and were confident we could do it the same way every time.

Eventually we started stringing those blocks together and creating the sequence of a story. It wasn’t until the final week before opening night that we were doing full runs of the play from start to finish, knowing we were fine-tuning at that point.

My lesson from that: you can’t make an entire story entirely ready for publication all at once. But you can polish sections until they work each on their own and then all together.

Keep it real

If you’re the viewer, a play’s appeal depends on the characters, and how the actors portray them. That’s the magic.

There are a lot of things you have to learn as an actor that may not occur to you before you start memorizing lines and movements. For me, one of the most important was understanding this: Reciting lines isn’t acting, any more than stringing words together is writing. Acting is inhabiting the character.

In real life, none of us knows what we’re going to say next in a conversation, or what any other people who are involved are going to do or say. Stage actors know everything that’s going to happen, but have to behave as if they don’t — as if they were in a real-life conversation or situation with no knowledge of where it’s headed. The best actors make you believe that everything they are doing is spontaneous in the moment. The best directors put them in an environment where they can do that.

A gripping story  does the same: it puts readers in places they could not otherwise visit or inhabit, and allows them to be intimate with people they have never known. My takeaway as an editor: keep your subjects real. Human beings, even the heroic, admirable or accomplished ones we may be writing about, are often uncertain, conflicted, uncomfortable or fragile. Let them be who they are.

Letting go

The opening night of a play is like sending story to the printer in journalism. The deadline is immutable, and transitional. After weeks of rehearsals and backstage preparations, when Act I, Scene I, starts, it is no longer the director’s play. Often, the director is not backstage before a performance or even in the theater. From that point on, it belongs to the actors and the audience — the same way a story belongs to its readers. Once it’s on the streets, all you can do is wait for the applause, or the stony silence.

Me, I had to watch every performance of “Rope,” discreetly from the back row of the theater. I observed the audience closely to see what they laughed at, gasped at, or seemed not to connect with — like looking over the shoulder of someone who is reading a big story you wrote or edited. “Rope” is a psychological thriller revolving around a grizzly murder, with comic relief elements. Some audiences laughed throughout. Others seemed uncertain about what was supposed to be funny.

Readers are a lot like that, too. If you think you know how they’re going to react, you’re in for a surprise. Whether acting or directing, I always hoped the audience members were thinking or talking about the play on the way home. As an editor, I hope for the same.

***

Don Nelson is owner/publisher/editor of the weekly Methow Valley News in north-central Washington state.

The post The role of editor as story director appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

If you have read the novels of Dennis Lehane (among them “Gone, Baby, Gone,” “Mystic River” and “Shutter Island,” all made into movies), you know that place is a powerful character, even a protagonist, in his works.

I recently came across Lehane’s 2017 novel, “Since We Fell,” on a local library shelf. It is a stark tale of morality and madness, driven at a relentless, chaotic pace by central character Rachel Childs.

Lehane’s opening paragraph introduces us to Rachel not by profiling her or giving her anything to do, but rather by describing where she grew up — by taking us to a place. Just 123 words later, you know a lot about Rachel Childs without a single word telling us what she looks like, what she does or why we might care.

Rachel was born in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts. It was known as the Region of the Five Colleges — Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts — and it employed two thousand faculty to teach twenty-five thousand students. She grew up in a world of coffee shops, B&Bs, wide town commons, and clapboard houses with wraparound porches and musky attics. In autumn, leaves fell by the tubful and choked the streets, spilled into the sidewalks, and clogged fence holes. Some winters, snow encased the valley in silence so dense it became its own sound. In July and August, the mail carrier rode a bicycle with a bell on the handlebar, and the tourists arrived for summer stock theater and antiquing.

Although the third-person omniscient narrator is describing memories, it’s clear that these are Rachel’s recollections, the way she remembers the environment that formed her. It was her world.

How Lehane characterizes the seasons is particularly illuminating, without resorting to meteorological terms. Even the snow reference isn’t really about snow, it’s about how winter feels.

Using place profiles in journalism

What does this have to do with your writing, and more specifically, your journalistic writing? Try to describe your own community, through four seasons and at a particular time. See if you can build a multi-layered sense of place that suggests the implications of that setting for the people who live there. Mimic Lehane’s structure if it helps.

Small spoiler alert: The soft-lens opening foreshadows just how far Rachel’s story trajectory takes her from what sounds like an idyllic upbringing. The contrast is meaningful.

And a not-really-giving-anything-away spoiler alert: Rachel Childs is a journalist.

***

Don Nelson is the owner/publisher/editor of a weekly newspaper in north-central Washington state. He has worked in newspapers and magazines for more than 40 years.

The post “…silence so dense it became its own sound.” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]I[/dc]f there were no Robert Caro, he could not easily be invented. Consider the job description: Commit your career to exhaustive research into the lives of two legendarily powerful men, produce a tome every eight or 10 or 12 years, and repeat. For several decades.

Fortunately, there is a Robert Caro, whose concept of biography is both exacting and literate. There’s that, and much more, to be drawn from Caro’s not-quite-autobiographical, mainly instructive little volume titled “Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing.”

Caro has made his living and estimable reputation writing about two people. His revelatory biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses, “The Power Broker,” came out in 1974 after about seven years of research and writing. It earned Caro a Pulitzer Prize for biography. He then devoted most of the subsequent half-century to a massive biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, with four volumes completed and the fifth due out soon. The third volume of that series, “Master of the Senate,” won Caro a second Pulitzer Prize.

At 230-plus pages, “Working” is the Caro equivalent of clearing your throat before a two-hour speech. Caro’s books are usually produced in a full-immersion, straight-line process that takes years of researching, interviewing and writing. He’s just getting warmed up at half-a-million words. “The Power Broker” topped 1,300 pages, and he’s still lamenting the 300,000 words he says were cut from the final version. The first four volumes of the Johnson biography average 900 pages per book.

Caro uncharacteristically worked in the writing of “Working” while completing the fifth volume the Johnson biography. There’s a reason for “Working’s” publication now, he candidly explains in the book: He hopes to write a full memoir, but at age 83 and given how long it takes to complete a typical Caro volume, he's acutely aware of time.

In any event, as Caro says in his introduction to “Working:"

I have so many thoughts about writing, so many anecdotes about research that I would like to preserve for anyone interested in reading them. I decided that, just in case, I’d put some of them down on paper now.

For which those of us who appreciate the rigor of powerful storytelling should be grateful.

It surely helped the publishing process that big chunks of “Working” are excerpted from previously published articles and interviews, which is fine by me. I’m just looking for guidance and inspiration, whatever the source. There is plenty of both in “Working.” Caro offers much of the same advice as other authors do. But few writers pursue the necessary discipline with as much purpose and passion. He is a bit self-deprecating in describing his obsession with original research (basically, he can’t help himself), but his justification is as profound as it is simple: Truth takes time.

Boy, does it ever. Especially if it is spun out in a deep-dive narrative that illuminates the subject, the historical context, and the places where it all happened in full-exposure detail. Inevitably, he has collected a few critics along with all those words, mostly for idealizing his subjects. But original documents, eyewitness interviews and on-the-ground descriptions build layers of authenticity into his work.

At the center of Caro’s passion for biography is his fascination with exploring where political power comes from and the implications of how it is exercised: “Because political power shapes all of our lives.” In the case of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, Caro writes not only about how they strode through history, but also who got trampled underfoot along the way.

[dc small]A[/dc] few things to be gleaned from “Working:”

• Writing, they say, is re-writing. When he’s ready, Caro starts by writing longhand, edits the heck out of that, types up the results on an electric typewriter, then edits the heck out that before it’s ready to publish. He confesses to editing book proofs as well. “I’d rewrite in the finished book if I could,” he said in one republished interview.

[caption id="attachment_151930" align="aligncenter" width="500"] The front endpapers of Robert Carols "Working," which shows his rewrites and edits on an early draft.[/caption]

• Caro describes himself as a fast writer, and to be sure it does take a while to write a million words, or several million if you count all the drafts, at any speed. His publishers are generous with the concept of deadlines. Caro’s internal clock tells him how long he’s going to need: “It’s the research that takes the time."
• As for the research, Caro’s tactics are timeless. He lives by the dictum, “never assume anything.” Documents are key, and he still cites a long-ago mentor’s admonition to “turn every page” — because the next one might have what you’re looking for. “You always need something in writing,” he says, and proves the point by citing previously unreported or misreported incidents that came to light through relentless reading.
• Caro is no cloistered research drudge. He talks to people — hundreds of people, from all walks of life — to mine their memories for revealing details. He will interview some people again and again, sometimes to the point of annoyance or anger, to confirm a bit of information or deepen an insight. The question he seems to pose most often is “What did you see?” — because he really wants to know. He has more than once tracked down sources that no one else could, or tried to, find.
• Place is always a major player in Caro’s books. He’s determined to put you in the middle of the culture, scene and action. He and his wife moved to the Texas Hill Country for three years, where Johnson grew up, so that his story would be “true to the reality” of the place.
• Caro doesn’t start writing his big books without first developing a short, finely honed outline for the entire volume. As he’s writing, he constantly checks his work against that outline to ensure that he’s staying true to his mission and vision.
• He sets daily writing goals and adheres to them. He wears a coat and tie to his office to remind himself that it’s a job.

Caro does this work for the same reason that all autobiographers, journalists and nonfiction narrative writers do: So you, dear reader, don’t have to. He gets closer to the bone than most historians do. But he is mindful that no matter how much digging he does, there might still be another nugget of information he’s missed.

“Of course there was more,” he says of one productive reporting expedition. “If you ask the right questions there always is. That’s the problem.”

[caption id="attachment_151933" align="aligncenter" width="500"] The back endpapers of Caro's "Working," which shows his continued rewrites on an edited draft.[/caption]

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[dc]“R[/dc]eporter” had to be the inevitable title for legendary investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh’s 2018 autobiography. It’s perfect — a simple, proud word that encompasses craft, passion and conscience. In Hersh’s telling, it’s the grandest job in the news business and, done right, the most demanding.

Hersh was a freelancer in 1969 when he uncovered the truth behind the My Lai massacre, a search-and-destroy mission that left 504 Vietnamese villagers dead, the majority of them women and children. His story became one of the revelations that shaped American sentiments against the Vietnam War. It also earned Hersh a Pulitzer Prize and elevated a career that included stints at The New York Times and The New Yorker.

I was a college undergraduate studying journalism when the My Lai story broke. By the time Hersh had moved on to covering Watergate, and President Richard M. Nixon resigned, I was a young reporter in my first job at a daily newspaper, where I sat next to the AP wire machine. My soundtrack was a constant rattle of news rolling off the machine, punctuated by the clang of “four bells” to announced major breaking news — the equivalent of DEFCON 1 in the daily news cycle.

In those days I learned a lot about journalism by reading the best work of my colleagues. I’ve been in the news business for almost 50 years now, these days as the publisher and editor of a tiny weekly in the remote mountains of Washington state. That puts me about as far from Hersh’s world of big names and big scoops as you can get. But good journalism is good journalism. I found his fundamental wisdom about the baseline tenets of the profession so essential that I read “Reporter” twice.

[dc small]B[/dc]ook jacket blurb-speak is often cloying and hyperbolic, but I couldn’t characterize the book any better than it characterizes itself: “an object lesson in reporting in its highest form.” Hersh, we’re told, “has been relentless in his pursuit of truth and his belief in challenging the official narrative.” That would be an air-puffed cliché if it weren’t so spot on.

[caption id="attachment_150966" align="alignright" width="300"] Seymour M. Hersh at Dispatch News Service in Washington, after being awarded the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Hersh disclosed the cover-up of the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai during the Vietnam War.[/caption]

Hersh didn’t write “Reporter” as a textbook or tutorial. It is labeled a memoir, and is a straightforward, detail-dense, chronological account of how he has always done the job, and why he does it that way. Nevertheless, it ends up being instructive throughout, if you are paying attention. Hersch rarely offers directives, but if you are or aspire to be a good reporter and are not taking notes, you’re missing the best journalism course you can get for under $30.

If nothing else, read the chapter titled “Finding Calley.” By reporting standards, it’s the equivalent of an action movie, with a cliffhanger plot. William Calley was a U.S. Army officer convicted by court martial of murdering 22 South Vietnamese civilians during the slaughter at My Lai.  Of 26 soldiers officers and soldiers charged with some role in the massacre, he was the only one convicted.

Sheer doggedness, instinct and serendipity led Hersh to Calley’s door at a Georgia military base, where he was awaiting court martial, when no one else could track him down.

The book jacket blurb’s preemption of “relentless” says a lot about Hersh, but it doesn’t begin to cover all the personality characteristics that make him a successful reporter. Above all, he is a hard worker, and good reporting is grindingly hard work. It can be slow, dull, frustrating and seemingly pointless, but the “aha” moments usually don’t come without a lot of slogging. Hersh’s curiosity is boundless, as is his willingness to learn and do the necessary research. He believes in initiative and enterprise, opportunism born of tenacity, truth as the only acceptable outcome.

[dc small]H[/dc]ere are a few things I gleaned from Hersh's memoir that are, and always should be, fundamental to good reporting:

• “Being first is not nearly as important as being right, and being careful …” Hersh says he learned that lesson in 1959 as a neophyte reporter at City News in Chicago. Too many journalists are still learning that basic tenet, or ignore it altogether.
• Experience matters, and one does well to pay close attention to those who have it.
• Sourcing is everything. Hersh carefully but assiduously cultivates sources, building relationships that may last for decades. Hersh pushes his sources as far as he can, and protects them when necessary. He cites a lot of anonymous sources — a continuing criticism of his work — but says he can vouch for them if required. Also, he is a voracious collector of documents. For instance, he gained unofficial access to and read 40 volumes of investigative testimony related to the Calley case, which let him draw “harrowing conclusions from the more than four hundred interviews the [investigative] panel conducted.”
• The “core lesson” of being a journalist, Hersh writes, is “read before you write.” For Hersh, in the pre-internet days, that meant hours in libraries or newspaper morgues, finding everything he could in the way of background.
• Good stories beget more good stories. Hersh’s exclusive revelations often generate additional information, contacts and angles. The credibility of his reporting encouraged additional potential sources to come forward.
• Don’t just jump abruptly into interviews with questions. The Hersh rule: “Never begin an interview by asking core questions.” When appropriate, tell the interviewee what you know (or think you know) to get things started. They may be motivated to correct or amend what you’re telling them. “I learned early in my career that the way to get someone to open up was to know what I was talking about and ask questions that showed it,” he writes.
• At the same time, don’t play coy with sources: “I never did an interview without learning all I could about the person with whom I was meeting, and I did all I could to let those I was criticizing or putting in professional jeopardy know just what I was planning to publish about them.”
• When you’ve thought of every way you can to get at the story, think some more. Be creative, innovative and, sometimes, a little unconventional. It was an impulse, at the end of a exhausting and frustrating day, that led Hersh to talk to a couple of guys working on a car in the dark, which then led him to Calley’s residence.
• Develop a thick skin and stand by your work. For months after the Calley story broke, Hersh endured brutal criticism by many in the military and even from professional peers. Hersh says he learned that “I would survive any criticism of a story I knew to be true.”
• Every detail matters, no matter how small. One slip-up can undo an otherwise brilliant story. Check everything, then check it again.

[dc small]I[/dc]nterestingly, Hersh doesn’t talk much about writing. He reported, and then he wrote, to lengths unimaginable in most contemporary publications. “The best way to tell a story, no matter how significant or complicated, was to get the hell out of the way and just tell it,” he writes.

Hersh doesn’t spare himself, citing mistakes, setbacks and moments of humility that come with the job if you do it long enough. He can be egotistical, arrogant, abrasive and high-minded. (“I was such a purist,” he says of a clash with editors at The New York Times over their agreement with the CIA not to publish a story Hersh was working on). He is a self-described loner who doesn’t always work and play well with others (like bosses and editors, for instance). In other words, he sounds like many investigative journalists we know. They’re not bland people.

In recent years, Hersh has encountered more complaints about his use of anonymous sources, and more of his work has been called into question.

That doesn’t make the lessons learned in “Reporter” any less valuable. Over the course of many decades, Hersh has worked with smart, courageous colleagues who believed in his work and made sure it found an audience. He also encountered, with evident disdain, a few journalism higher-ups whom he considered timid, self-censoring or too chummy with the same power elites whose questionable acts Hersh was about to expose.

Hersh, at age 82, isn’t finished. He continues to work on projects with the same one-foot-in-front-of-the other determination that has distinguished his career for more than half a century. He’s a reporter.

The post Lessons from a relentless “Reporter” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the tenth and last in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of a special and sadly contracting culture. The author, Don Nelson, has been a newsman for almost 50 years. Links to previous odes are at the end of this poem.

READER, LEFT BEHIND

Hi there. Remember me?

Long-time subscriber, first-time caller.
I used to be your BFF.
Loyal. Supportive. Love print
Because it is tactile and portable
And accessible on my schedule.

I didn’t complain about the inane editorials
Or when the paper landed in the bushes
Instead of the front porch
Or when you raised subscription rates
Or when you slashed coverage
Or got rid of the movie and TV listings
Or pulled back distribution
And got rid of a century's worth
Of editorial experience
In one day.

I stuck with you but
There are (at least) two things
I don’t understand:

Why are you so afraid of me?
You keep running cartoon strips
That haven’t been funny for 50 years
Or actually appeared (Peanuts) 50 years ago
Because you’re terrified I’ll cancel
If I can’t read Garfield?
(For the record, it was always awful).

And, why did you abandon me
For people who have no use for print
And will not ever pay for news?

When you pivoted to digital
I tried to pivot, too,
But it made me dizzy
And I had to lie down.

Do you even recognize me?
I’m your remaining demographic
And I’m going to die before
You figure this sh*t out.

To see previous poems:

Ode #1, City Editor, Friday Night 
Ode #2: Reporter, On Deadline
Ode #3: Copy Editor, Standing Guard
Ode #4: Photographer, Under The Gun
Ode #5: Publisher, In A Squeeze
Ode #6: CEO, In the Catbird Seat
Ode #7: Media Consultant, At a Cost
Ode #8: Keynote Speaker, Faking It
Ode #9: Former Staffer, Under The Bus

The post Newsroom Ode #10: A loyalist’s last lament appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the ninth and penultimate in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from a different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of a special and sadly contracting culture. The author, Don Nelson, has been a newsman for almost 50 years. Links to previous odes follow this poem.

FORMER STAFFER, UNDER THE BUS

A while back all the airlines adopted
A long-term strategy:
Make your product increasingly worse;
Treat your customers like crap;
Blame all problems on the employees.

Works for them.

The newspaper industry tried the same thing.
How do you think that’s going?

To see previous poems:

Ode #1, City Editor, Friday Night 
Ode #2: Reporter, On Deadline
Ode #3: Copy Editor, Standing Guard
Ode #4: Photographer, Under The Gun
Ode #5: Pity the Poor Publisher
Ode #6: CEO, In the Catbird Seat
Ode #7: Media Consultant, At a Cost
Ode #8: Keynote Speaker, Faking It

The post Newsroom Ode #9: Echoes from an empty desk appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the eighth in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from a different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of a special and sadly contracting culture. The author, Don Nelson, has been a newsman for almost 50 years. Previous poems are listed at after today's ode.

 

KEYNOTE SPEAKER, FAKING IT

You people will listen to anything.

At a media management conference
I gripped the podium, leaned forward
And pronounced to the room:
“Unless you are using
Fungible parametric systology
As your decision-making paradigm
You will fail.”

Everyone nodded and wrote it down.
No one asked what it meant because
No one wanted to look stupid
In front of all the others.

I made it up.

When I offered a webinar on
Fungible parametric systology
I made a small fortune in a single day.

I have a blog and a podcast
And am on the speed dial
Of every media analyst and media writer
And media critic and media guru
And self-promoting media pundit
In the country.

I acknowledge the irony
That I myself am
A self-promoting media pundit.
It pays better than most other media jobs.
And the fewer media jobs there are
The more people listen to me.

Here’s the secret: Always predict the worst.
When it happens, you’ll be a genius.
If it doesn’t, no one will remember.

You get paid either way.

To see previous poems in this series:

Ode #1, City Editor, Friday Night 
Ode #2: Reporter, On Deadline
Ode #3: Copy Editor, Standing Guard
Ode #4: Photographer, Under The Gun
Ode #5: Pity the Poor Publisher
Ode #6: CEO, In the Catbird Seat
Ode #7: Media Consultant, At a Cost

The post Newsroom Ode #8: Podium pontifications appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the seventh in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of a special and sadly contracting culture. The author, Don Nelson, has been a newsman for almost 50 years.

To see previous poems:

Ode #1, City Editor, Friday Night 

Ode #2: Reporter, On Deadline

Ode #3: Copy Editor, Standing Guard

Ode #4: Photographer, Under the Gun

Ode #5: Publisher, In a Squeeze

Ode #6: CEO, In the Catbird Seat

MEDIA CONSULTANT, AT A COST

Digitaldigitaldigital
Digitaldigitaldigital
Digitaldigitaldigital
Digitaldigitaldigital
Digitaldigitaldigital
Digitaldigitaldigital
First.

Oh, and ...

Socialmediasocialmedia
Socialmediasocialmedia
Socialmediasocialmedia
Socialmediasocialmedia.

That will be $25,000.
Plus expenses.

 

The post Newsroom Ode #7: Desperation calls the consultant appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the sixth in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of a special and sadly contracting culture. The author, Don Nelson, has been a newsman for almost 50 years.

To see previous poems:

Ode #1, City Editor, Friday Night 

Ode #2: Reporter, On Deadline

Ode #3: Copy Editor, Standing Guard

Ode #4: Photographer, Under The Gun

Ode #5: Publisher, In a Squeeze

CEO, IN THE CATBIRD SEAT 

You wouldn’t believe the bonus

I’m getting this year.

 

We lost a boatload of money

In every market, but less

Than we would have,

Because I eliminated jobs

And consolidated operations

And slashed benefits

And gutted pension funds

And pimped for Wall Street

Because it is my job

To maximize shareholder value.

 

Our debt load would bankrupt

Many third-world countries.

It doesn’t matter.

 

Our stock tanks, the board loves me.

Our circulation drops, the board adores me.

Our advertising revenues plummet, half the board

Wants to sleep with me

Because I will do whatever it takes

To protect their dividends.

 

Nobody blinks

When I add a couple of vice-presidents;

We’ve got a lot to do.

Fat to cut. Functions to streamline.

Severance packages to fabricate.

Transitional strategies to invent.

 

Bonuses for everyone!

 

We have a growth plan:

We acquire failing companies

From desperate sellers for rock bottom prices,

And suck the marrow out of their bones

To cover this quarter’s shortfall,

And leave communities, and counties, and entire states

With zombie newspapers or

None at all, if that pencils out.

 

I go to conventions and make speeches

About doing “more with less”

And intra-market operational efficiencies

And cross-platform synergies

And the digital imperative.

 

I never talk about people.

We are not in the people business.

I don’t talk about readers because

I don’t know any readers.

I know metrics and P&L and ROI

And the board chairman’s favorite Scotch.

 

I was once E&P’s Publisher of the Year.

And got fired the next month

By a guy at corporate

Who used to be beet farmer.

 

When the dark side beckoned

I was ready.

The post Newsroom Ode #6: Sitting pretty at the top appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.