Editors Note: Ask readers
or viewers or elected
officials what kind of news they’re looking for these days, and you’ll
often hear something like: “Why don’t you give us some good news for
change?” Run that idea by most journalists, and you’ll see their eyes
begin to roll.
So what in the world is a veteran Washington correspondent like Frank Greve doing on the Good News beat for the McClatchy Washington Bureau? Poynter Online asked Greve that the other day, and he followed up with the answers (along with the questions) that follow.
What does a good news reporter do?
The same thing that every other reporter does. The only difference is
that I presume good things happen and are worth writing about.
Softballs, mostly?
Softballs never. Typically, it’s overturning common knowledge that’s
wrong. For example, the marketing for Viagra and other similar drugs
turns out to be based on a definition of impotence that makes the
problem seem much more prevalent than men or their lovers consider it
to be. Also, the number of rapes in the United States is down
dramatically from the 70s, according to the best available trend data.
The same goes for juvenile crime and unmarried pregnancies.
Have you ever met another good-news reporter?
No.
What got you into this?
During the last Democratic convention, I was back in Washington on what
was then the Knight Ridder national desk. I had some idle time, so
I scoured the wires, including daybooks and PR wires, looking for good
news. I found a lot of story possibilities in stats from the National
Institutes of Health and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, for example.
A paper-lobbying group reported that recycling was way up, and an
insurance-industry group reported that delaying the age of driver
licensing, as many states are now doing, has cut fatality rates for
teens. I wrote a memo saying that we should cover this realm, and as I
was doing so, I realized that the job would be more fun than desk editing.
Were you right?
Absolutely. Writing good news is like hiking in virgin land. And papers eat it up.
Why were the stories uncovered?
Often, one government agency reports a statistic while another employs
the experts who understand the trend. The numbers get reported as a
briefable daily, if at all, and the experts never get to explain the
numbers. Fully reporting both the numbers and the reasons behind them
tends to be more than a daily story if you’re not just kissing it off.
Also, press releases tend to be badly written, which amplifies a
tendency among reporters to reject anything that a PR person’s written.
Finally, there’s manly reporting, which speaks truth to power or shouts
it, and then there’s candy-ass reporting, which is less pugnacious.
Being pugnacious, for a lot of reporters, is more fun.
Really?
I used to be an investigator, and some of my old friends, when I told
them what I was doing, reacted as if I’d told them I had cancer. Once
they read the copy, most — but not all — of them were encouraging.
Is reporting good news hard work?
More certainly it isn’t easier than other kinds of reporting. If you
try to hit to all fields — and this is a form of general assignment, I
suppose — getting up to speed for each story takes a while. That’s
partly me: I’m not a real quick study.
Have you ever gotten deeply into a story and decided that it wasn’t good news?
Oh my gracious, yes, as Donald Rumsfeld would say. For example,
there’s a lot of data indicating that yanking healthy wisdom
teeth of older teens is an unnecessary pain. I figured I’d earned the
thanks of a grateful nation if I reported this — until I
discovered that it’s an unresolved question, dentally speaking, in
which the trend in recent research favors the yankers. So I dropped the
story. Sometimes, if the good-news angle doesn’t hold up, but the upshot
seems like a strong story, I’ll offer it to another reporter in the
bureau.
Is there a distinctive pleasure in good-news reporting?
Yes. I’m 60, and I’m a little tired of scaring the bejesus out of
people or telling them about one more Washington perfidy that they
can’t do anything about. I don’t think watchdog reporting of that
sort is in short supply, but good-news reporting certainly is. My
satisfaction when I head home is less ego-driven than it used to be.
There also seems to be more genuine gratitude among readers than when I
used to tell them that the Pentagon was squandering their money or
that their charities were cheats.
So where can I read some of this stuff?
McClatchy has a category for it called “Some Good News.”
