In some families, parents mark
milestones in their children's lives -- leaving home for college,
graduation, wedding day -- b
y writing a letter offering advice,
encouragement, warnings about and hope for the future.
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A similar custom exists in the literary world when masters of the craft offer advice to apprentices.
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"Forget your generalized audience," John Steinbeck, the novelist and
Nobel laureate, once wrote to a young writer. "In the first place, the
nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second
place, unlike the theatre, it doesn't exist. I have found that
sometimes it helps to pick out one person, a real person you know, or
an imagined person -- and write to that one."
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This epistolary tradition has withered in our evanescent age of e-mail
and text messaging that represent the dominant and ephemeral ways we
communicate with each other.�
Bucking that trend is a series of
pocket-sized books that seeks to compress, using a "Letters to" format,
the essential philosophy, ethics and practical advice for newcomers in
a particular field.
Since 2002, Basic Books has offered up these guides,
composed by leading voices in each field, to young conservatives,
Catholics, lawyers, contrarians, gymnasts, therapists, artists -- even
golfers.
This spring, the series finally got around to
young journalists. In this era of journalistic scandals, subpoenas
and hand-wringing about that soon-to-be extinct creature, the Mediasaurus, it's about frigging time.
Young or old, reporters, editors -- indeed
anyone who practices journalism or consumes it, can profit from the
lessons, wisdom, war stories, battle plans, celebrations of best
practices and the stinging lessons of failure contained in the 177
pages that constitute "Letters to a Young Journalist."
For this
installment, the series editors turned to an accomplished journalist,
author of six non-fiction books and inspiring teacher,
Samuel G. Freedman of the
Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. (I feel a conflict of interest
coming on. I graduated from Columbia in 1974, long before Prof.
Freedman joined the faculty; we have never met, although we share a
mutual friend, Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia's dean of students and contributor
to Poynter Online's Web Tips column.)
I pursued a journalism career largely because of a book, "The Kingdom
and the Power," Gay Talese's sweeping and romantic narrative history of The New York
Times, which I read at the 6,000-circulation daily where my reporting
career began in 1972. Three decades later, "Letters to a Young
Journalist" may well become the spark that ignites many 21st-century
journalism careers. But its messages are not only relevant to newsroom
newbies; I found it also fanned the embers for someone who came into the business in the 20th century.�
Freedman
was a staff reporter for The New York Times from 1981-87, when he left
to write books and teach (he continues to contribute to the paper with
an "On
Education" column). But, like many reporters, he too came from humble
beginnings, a 45,000 daily in suburban New Jersey, a path he recommends
in a section entitled "In Praise of Gradualism."
"The important thing, especially in your twenties, is not to be in New
York, if that means you're going to wind up as an editorial assistant
or a fact-checker, no matter how prestigious or how trendy the news
organization." Better to develop your skills, Freedman argues, in more
modest journalistic territory so that when you seek to climb the career
ladder, "you won't be a supplicant scrambling for any piddling
freelance assignments; you'll be a staff writer or a contributing
editor or a producer."
�
Freedman's focus is razor-sharp. The book has just four chapters:
Temperament, Reporting, Writing and Career, book-ended by an
introduction and an epilogue, entitled "Ancestor Worship." (See an
excerpt, "Tacking.")
Throughout, he introduces the reader to familiar names and unknowns
whose works conveys the challenges and rewards of a life in journalism.
He buttresses these case studies with his own deeply-held beliefs
about journalism under subheads -- "Failing in Public," "Do What
Terrifies You," "Love and Quarantine," "Showing Up" and "Loyalty Oaths" --
that leave little doubt about where he stands.
The book's eclectic
bibliography of books, articles, documentaries, feature films and
plays covers five pages. It constitutes a reading list ranging from
academic fundamentals ("Discovering the News" by Michael
Schudson) to the heavily reported and vividly rendered fiction of Richard
Price ("Clockers" and "Freedomland").
"Letters to a Young Journalist" doesn't shy away from the hard truths
of the newsroom. "Journalism," Freedman writes, "is a business of
proving yourself anew every single story, ever single day... None of us
are in this for the money or the acclaim."
But those painful realities are tempered by the often joyous struggles
of the profession: dogged reporting, graceful writing, all within a
moral framework of a profession that continues to draw our best and
brightest -- young journalists, and older ones -- who are determined to
beat journalism's reaper as well as deadline's ticking clock.
In a recent e-mail exchange, Freedman discussed the thinking behind "Letters to a Young Journalist."
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CHIP SCANLAN: Why did you write "Letters to a
Young Journalist?"
SAMUEL FREEDMAN: The narrow, literal answer would be that Basic Books asked
me. Basic has been doing a series of mentoring books modeled on [Rainer Maria] Rilke's famous "Letters To A Young Poet." At first, I actively tried to convince the Basic
people I was the wrong guy. I felt acutely aware of not having covered a war or
the White House or been a foreign correspondent -- the traditional prestige
assignments. I kept saying, David Remnick or Nick Lemann ought to be writing
this book, and I wasn't being falsely modest.
But I came around to thinking that my gradual trajectory
from small paper to mid-sized paper to the Times to books was a useful,
accessible model for young journalists to follow. And I guess I realized there
was no reason to apologize for my idiosyncratic passions in journalism --
cultural affairs, education, religion, immigration -- of for my inclination to
write about politics from the bottom-up rather than the top-down. Those choices
are part of who I am.
"The important thing, especially in your twenties, is not to be in New York, if that means you're going to wind up as an editorial assistant or a fact-checker, no matter how prestigious or how trendy the news organization." -- Samuel FreedmanAlso, as someone who's taught journalism for 15 years by
now, I've had to think in a focused, formal way about how one teaches this
craft, and about what a journalist needs to know. And because my students have
been successful -- 35 have book contracts, a whole bunch are on [the staffs of] The New York
Times, NPR [and] other top places -- I believed my teaching had value. Finally, the
book gave me a chance to make some of the best lessons I've devised over the
years more widely available.
I savored the chance to write about how a journalist encounters
the world, engages with it, makes sense of it in written or broadcast form. I
felt that even the best craft books, like Jim Stewart's "Follow The Story,"
left room for a book like mine that deals a lot with the idea, and the moral
responsibilities, of being a journalist.
You provide an extensive list of "works cited in this book."
What other source materials did you draw on?
�That bibliography is fairly complete in terms of written or
broadcast material. But I also drew on cultural figures -- Picasso, Coltrane,
Manuel Puig, Romare Bearden, Joni Mitchell. David Hare, among others -- whose
work or whose method ended up expressing certain truths about great reporting
or writing. I talked or e-mailed with a lot of my former students to ask them
what they would have wanted a book like this to include. As I said earlier, the
book utilizes some of my favorite lessons, though I never teach from a script.
And, in part, the book is a memoir of my experiences as a journalist, from
junior high school up until today, as a graybeard of 50. So I drew on my memory,
re-read some of my clips, and interviewed some of my colleagues on past jobs.
What surprised you during the
reporting and writing?
I
don't know if I'd call it a surprise, but this book needed
a different voice than I normally use. I was aiming for a tone that was
instructive and inspiring, but also casual, conversational. I was
aware, as I
wrote and then as I rewrote, that the words should sound like spoken
language.
All great writing ought to sound shapely in the mind's ear, but most of
my
books and articles look for a slightly elevated tone -- what Aristotle
calls a "noble diction." In this book, I hope I wasn't ignoble, but I
did hope to be a
little more colloquial than usual. I was trying to strike of tone of
being
authoritative without pontificating.
The fact that the book took a fair amount of reporting
didn't surprise me, because for me all writing springs from reporting. What did
surprise me was to learn, from Michael Schudson's book "Discovering The News," how
recent (historically speaking) is the archetype of a professional journalist
conducting reporting as opposed to being a partisan pamphleteer. I was also
struck at [how] current many of Walter Lippmann's criticisms of the press in the
World War I era still seemed to be. It was he, not Noam Chomsky, who came up
with the phrase and concept of "manufacturing consent."
What lessons did you learn from
writing this book?
I can't point to a specific lesson. Writing the book was
more a process of codifying my journalistic value system -- the values I strive
to adhere to personally, and the ones I try to impart to my students.
Why did you organize the book by four themes: Temperament,
Reporting, Writing and Career?
In
part, to provide a sense of narrative, of forward motion.
Part of the challenge of writing what is fundamentally a book of essays
is to
make that book more than just a collection of pieces that could be
shuffled
into any order. The four thematic chapters reflect to me the process of
becoming a journalist, starting with one's sensibility, one's social
responsibility, one's obligation in a moral universe and the inevitable
tug-of-war between all those things and the exigencies of often
unearthing stories
people do not want told. Then, since reporting drives everything in
writing, it
was clear that the reporting chapter came next, and writing should
follow
reporting. And I thought career should come last, because thinking
about career
is irrelevant if you haven't sharpened your intellect and mastered your
craft.
Only after those stages should you worry about where you fit into the
marketplace. I'm always telling my students that if you just
concentrate on
getting better and better in your work, the jobs will be there -- maybe
not as
quickly as you hope, but ultimately. Among my students, I've never seen
great
talent go unrecognized in the long term.
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Journalists have perhaps never been held in lower esteem.
What are the themes or arguments you constructed in "Letters to a Young
Journalist" that felt like swimming upstream?
I felt like I was fighting a two-front war. On the one hand,
journalism has inflicted some really grievous wounds on itself lately -- the discredited
"60 Minutes" story on Bush, the Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley fabrication cases, the
murky connections between Judy Miller and her sources, and so forth. So first
you have to acknowledge the damage we've done to ourselves. But the other front
is the assault from both left and right on the very idea that there is such a
thing as a professional, nonpartisan, open-minded journalist more capable than
the average Joe of sorting out human events. Or the belief that all journalists
are biased anyway -- the left tells us we're lapdogs for Bush, the right tells
us we're traitors -- so why not just go to a more Western European model of ALL
news organizations having overt partisan or ideological agendas.
So I tried to uphold journalism's venerable traits as a
response both to the profession's own failings and to the attacks on it from
outside. I'm not talking about being merely an adequate, competent reporter.
I'm talking about being intellectually ravenous, capable of suspending your own
predispositions, willing to entertain competing ideas within your own head,
ready to move beyond interviewing experts to the point of achieving a certain
expertise yourself.
I write in the book about the idea of tradition being
radical. And in making that argument I thought a lot about Arthur Schlesinger's
book "The Vital Center," which in the early years of the Cold War argued so
eloquently for an anti-Communist liberalism that could respond equally well to
McCarthyite reactionaries and Marxist advocates or apologists. Schlesinger
didn't see the center as being pallid or equivocal, and neither do I. He see
it as being engaged in fierce, principled battle against all forms of extremism
and simple-mindedness. The same should hold for journalism.
What's the most controversial
argument you make in the book?
I think I took a lot of different provocative positions -- my
criticism of the blogosphere, my condemnation of "non-fiction" that includes
fictionalization, my counter-argument to Janet Malcolm's odious proposition
that all journalists seduce and betray their subjects (just because she did). I
grew up in a very political household, where we vigorously discussed issues and
ideas, where we valued a smart rhetorical or ideological foe, so I relished the
chance to get into the mix on the matter of journalism itself.
You're tough on bloggers, FOX News and citizen journalists.
As a former New Yorke Times reporter and tenured professor at Columbia Journalism School,
what separates you from charges that you're an elitist scold?
I don't mind being called an elitist if being an elitist
means being the best, not being snooty and effete. When I hear people complain
about the elite, I always ask them if they'd like to apply their principle to
sports. Let's have an NFL season with only mediocre players, because all those
elitists like Tom Brady and Donovan McNabb are ruining the game. Somehow people
don't mind the elite all of a sudden. I don't think an amateur is as qualified
as a professional in journalism. There are qualified journalists and scholars
whose blogs I do read -- Juan Cole on the Middle East,
Andrew Sullivan on social and political issues, Gregg Easterbrook on football.
But in their cases, the blog is simply an alternative delivery system. These
people write out of a body of research, if not for every posting, then
certainly over the course of a career. But to just sit down and write your
opinions or harvest the day's gossip -- that's not journalism, even if it is
momentarily chic. As for FOX, it's a fascinating political movement, but it's
not a news organization in any way I recognize. If that's scolding, then I'm
guilty as charged.
But I want to be more than a chastising prophet. I think
that the best bloggers and podcasters and webzines of the future can be
enriched by an appreciation of the commitment to reporting, unbiased inquiry
and lucid expression that the evil MSM can practice at its best. The "old" can
inform and enhance the "new." Just the other day, I was listening to Terry
Gross interview the jazz drummer Paul Motian on "Fresh Air." Now, I associate
Motian with modal and free jazz, modern forms, but he was talking about how
much he'd been influenced by supposed old-timers like Chick Webb. In
journalism, as in jazz, there is a tradition, and that tradition has something
to teach modernists, too.
Can you explain the concept of "freedom within discipline"
as it applies to journalistic work?
This is a Jesuit concept. Applied to journalism, it says that
you don't create out of nothing. You don't just to start to write without any
sense of where you're going. Neither, though, do you just endlessly repeat the
standard forms of a news story, or a news feature or a magazine piece with its
chapter structure. You absorb those structures so you have an overall sense of
where you're going in a piece of writing. And you probably commit some kind of
outline to paper before even starting to write. Knowing your direction, you
then are free to do the creative work of choosing words, phrases, voice, or unspooling a line of narrative. I also compare the process to jazz
improvisation. Great jazz musicians didn't just solo at random; they soloed in
the context of certain scales, chord changes, progressions [and] harmonic theories
that they had studied and ultimately assimilated.
What are your hopes for this
book?
In the short range, I always hope for good reviews and
decent sales. But, really, my goal is that the book will have legs, that it
will last. If you really want my dream, it's that the book will become a
classic like William Zinsser's "On Writing Well." In the fullness of time, I'll
find out whether I met that benchmark or not, but it's certainly what I aimed
to reach.
Your book is rich with wisdom, solid examples and practical
advice. Are any of its lessons of use to
journalists of any generation?
In writing the book, I tried to imagine myself speaking to a
high school or college journalism student, a reporter on his or her first job.
I do hope, though, that the book can speak to anyone in the profession who
cares about excellence and about ethics -- in their own work and in the field as
a whole. I've had Columbia students who had never
done an interview before starting journalism school, and I've had Columbia students who left
jobs at The New York Times and The Miami Herald and The Dallas Morning News to come
here, and I think I had something to teach all of them. (Just as they had
something to teach me.) If the book can have a similar reach, I'd feel
gratified.
Why are you tough on yourself -- describing reporting gaffes
and publishing humiliations and other professional stumbles along your career
path?
In the book, I quote a minister telling his congregation,
"Church isn't a museum of saints. It's a hospital for sinners." In that same
spirit, I've told almost all of my Columbia classes over the years that my credibility comes from my failures as well as my
successes. Nobody is more forbidding, or more insufferable, than a paragon. So
it seemed entirely right to write about my failings. Also, a young journalist
needs to know that someone of my age and standing has struggled, too, and that
whatever I've accomplished has come with plenty of sweat and pain.
Why are you such a hard-liner about the blurry lines between
fiction and narrative non-fiction?
Because not enough other people are. Or, at least, not enough
people in the publishing industry and the literary world are. I think most
journalists intuitively understand that non-fiction means you don't make stuff
up. But agents, editors, publishers, critics, authors -- too many of them think
the divide between fact and invention is just some moldy, outdated, prudish
inconvenience. That's why, to me, the James Frey episode was the most predictable
scandal in the world. A nonfiction writer, whether in the daily paper or in a book,
operates a trust relationship with a reader. Once you rupture that trust, every
journalist's credibility suffers.
Melvin Mencher, a legendary Columbia professor, preached the value of
counterphobia. You call it "Do What Terrifies You." Why is this such an important
lesson for young journalists?
There's a temptation, once you've mastered a certain skill
or form, to endlessly repeat it, especially if you're praised for doing it
well. Routine is safe. But routine is the enemy of growth. So you can't grow
unless you're ready to risk failure and to stare down your own fears. When my
book-writing students at Columbia
tell me their topic scared them, I say, "That's how you can tell it's a book
topic." If it didn't scare, then it'd be too small.
Of all the lessons in the book,
what do you think is most important?
Can I choose two? That journalism, practiced ethically and
excellently, is a deeply moral profession. And that reporting enables writing.
One of your sections is entitled "In Praise of Gradualism." What do you mean?
I mean that any ambitious young journalist -- and I certainly
was one -- wants to vault to the top very fast and feels frustration when that
doesn't happen. But the most important thing is to be able to report and write
every day, no matter the size of the paper or TV station or whatever. When you work,
you get better, and when you get better, the career takes care of itself.
After nearly four decades reporting and writing, what role
does teaching play in your life?
Teaching excites me. I get an unselfish joy out of seeing my
students get book contracts or land on major news organizations. And I get joy
out of seeing someone who's struggling overcome, seeing someone who's on the
verge of dropping out decide to persevere. Also, as I said before, when I teach,
I'm forced to really think through what I believe, why I believe it, what the
best practices are. And the teaching helps [my] writing, as well, because
whenever I write, whether at article length or book length, I feel like I have
to prove to my students that I'm capable, that I'm not some charlatan, that I'm
not some washed-up has-been. Even if I do need bifocals.
Some of us do not seem to fit into any...
