On the Death of Journalism, and My Foray into the Coffin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I wrote this as a reflection on my experience at my internship at the NBC News London Bureau. The whole studying abroad in London thing was kind of a surreal experience for me, but this internship was especially so, and I still can’t quite figure why. It’s as if I remember it as vividly as it happened yesterday, but in another sense, the whole semester seemed lifetimes ago, perhaps a part of some weird dream. Alas, I did learn a few things from this internship, but none of them actually related to becoming a broadcast journalist.

 

They say that the old journalism is dying, a slow, painful, penniless death. They say that readership and viewership is down, and advertisers have run away. They say that in 50 years, we will have shuddered at the thought that we once read newspapers and magazines on actual paper produced from trees, and these wise pundits will be writing their commentaries in the vast galaxy of cyberspace, submitting their opinions to editors they see once or twice a year if at all, or more often, self-publishing on their blogs.

Some will say that in these good old days we relied on anchors like Peter Jennings and Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw to be our trusted messengers, our beloved news-tellers, and that there was nothing like listening to one of your friends, indeed, one of your family, inform you each night. They will say it was a magical experience, a magical time, something that we just don’t get anymore in this time of fast food and even faster news.

But those are just the old people, the out of touch generation, who don’t know any better. Fearful of learning and beholding something new, they refuse to adjust to the changing dynamics of media, instead lecturing their children and and their grandchildren that there were never better times to be an informed citizen than in the late 20th and early 21st century.

Their children will quietly explain to them that the vast information superhighway that is the internet is a much better way to gather much more news much more quickly, and even better, it costs nearly nothing to produce. The newspapers and the television news networks were euthanized, they say, because they were simply unable to meet consumer demand for quantity of news, as soon as it happens; their model of presenting information late that night or the next day just wasn’t feasible anymore.

I don’t want to believe my children, but at the same time, I have to. Indeed, I am a part of a generation that’s in a weird place in media history; we reside neither in the troubles before nor the aftermath of the media revolution; indeed, we are in the midst of the revolution. We are neither old school nor new school— we are a mixture of both. Growing up and reading the newspaper and reading magazines and watching the nightly news, I have done so less often as I have grown older, and instead moved towards blogs and other websites that break the news faster than I could ever expect. The Yankees sign another all-star free agent? We have sources confirming the deal before the name is signed on the dotted line. Political candidate X says something questionable about Political Candidate Y? Blogs break the news before the candidates even realize they made a mistake. This is the culture of media we are in nowadays. I don’t want to be a part of it, but I feel I must for my survival.

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I walked into the NBC office expecting a bustling newsroom, with producers, correspondents, and various other characters rushing about to complete their stories, or frantically trying to do more research for the spot they will be doing in 20 minutes. Instead, the NBC London Bureau was quite slow. Nobody was rushing around, nobody was even talking about the news at the time. It was to be expected, naturally, because the network was focusing their attention and resources on the historic US presidential election, and thus demand for international news wasn’t as high as it normally was. My job description was quite simple: Monitor and log video feeds that come in from international news agencies, transcribe interviews that were done for the NBC Nightly News and the Today Show, and occasionally go out on shoots with producers, correspondents, and crew members to lend a hand while also observing how network news gets produced. I am a print journalist by training, so this was an entirely new experience for me. Instead of crafting a story with big words and complex syntactical structures, I had to learn to craft a story with images and correct voice intonation. Of course, towards the internship I actually got the opportunity to craft my own story, but most of the time I spent in quiet observance, learning what makes TV news journalists tick.

Of course, I learned that TV news journalists aren’t merely the correspondents who appear on camera. They are the bureau coordinators, like Lucy Muccini. They are the Newsdesk editors, like Peter Jeary. They are the Producers, like Karl Bostic. They are the cameramen, the story editors, the engineers, the archive librarians. They are the webmasters, the IT engineers, the receptionists, and the interns. We all gather and produce the news. Dawna Friesen or Stephanie Gosk or Jim Maceda might get all the credit, but they are merely the anchor leg of the journalism relay. At the end of the day, spectators will only remember who crossed the finish line, but if it weren’t for those who ran the beginning laps, the anchor wouldn’t have been in a position to raise the baton in victory.

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My work was quite tedious, and at times, I questioned exactly what role I expected in this journalism relay. I would essentially copy and paste text descriptions of news feeds onto INews, NBC’s news server. These text descriptions would only stay in the system for a week, then be wiped away forever. If I was lucky, a producer or a editor might see one of these stories and news feeds I have copied and pasted and think that might be an interesting idea for a bigger story, or an interesting element they could fit into their own stories. Essentially, interns were there to provide the mere possibility that perhaps one of these feeds could be used in the news producing process. This was no guarantee, however.

When I wasn’t copying and pasting, I was transcribing interviews, which was even more tedious but at least slightly more interesting, in the hope that a producer might see a usable quote and pick out the soundbite. Essentially, interns were there to provide the mere possibility that perhaps one of these hundreds and thousands of quotes would be usable in a story.

There were 7 interns, and we generally spread the work and time around, but that was difficult when there wasn’t much work to do. NBC could have done with a smaller number of interns, but hey, you never turn down free labor. There were times where I would have loved nothing more than to spend an hour at the copier making copies or going out to get everybody coffee or something of that sort, but if I can say anything about the people at the Newsdesk, it’s that they have probably been in our position before and realize that people don’t like to work at such a well-respected place at NBC and have to get coffee or make copies. Though all of us interns volunteered to to anything they needed of us, no matter how mundane, it wasn’t often, if at all, we were expected to do such work. Thus, I took this as an opportunity to observe and reflect not on myself and my role in this particular journalism relay, but rather observe others; reflect on how they might have gotten to where they are now, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, what they think about the role they play in journalism. I was going to take this as an opportunity to learn from their successes and mistakes, and think about how I was going to become a much better journalist than they are. This is not to say that I think I will become such a legendary journalist myself, but observing people who were surviving and sometimes thriving in such an established setting provided me a bar to pass and made me realize that I too have the skills to succeed in this business.

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Richard the cameraman was the first person at NBC who had a conversation with me about my career goals. It was my third day at the office, and already I had the opportunity to go out on a shoot. I told him about my desire to go into print journalism, and he reminded me to remain open about television, and that perhaps my experience at NBC would change my mind. It was when he approached me that I felt comfortable with talking with people about the office about what I wanted to do with my life and how this NBC experience might fit into that. The shoot went well, he explained various procedural details as we were going along to give me a sense of what to look out for, and when we got back to the office, he thanked me for my work.

Throughout the next few months we saw each other around the office nodding politely at each other, but not conversing. This was my relationship with a lot of people I saw around the office but didn’t actually work with; I was often introduced to somebody but instantly forgot their name, and thus our relationship consisted of us nodding politely at each other.

On my last day, I was asked to be interviewed for a story, and Richard was the camera guy. As I walked back to the interview room with the producer, Richard came up to me, and said, ” This is your last day? That’s unfortunate we haven’t met yet. My name is Richard.”

I decided to hold my tongue.

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I had never previously thought about going into broadcast journalism; indeed, I was most enthusiastic about this internship merely because there wasn’t a print internship available. My experience did not necessarily make me more excited about a broadcast career; the skills required for such a career, though they are similar in some respects to print, are different. In broadcast I can no longer use fancy words or go too in-depth into each and every story; there is simply not enough airtime, whereas on a print piece you can read it, re-read it, and ruminate on it. Perhaps you enjoy it better the second time you read it as opposed to the first. In television, you watch one story, it’s on to the next story. You don’t get that same chance of reflection.

Part of this outlook comes with observing, mainly, the producers and correspondents, who didn’t seem to discuss their pieces with pride. Instead, it was more a matter of “I need to do this for my story. I need this person to go do this. I can’t spend too much time on this particular part of the story, because I’m juggling 4 other pieces”. They all seemed to reside in their own little world, obsessed with themselves and their role and their responsibilities and detached from the actual subjects they were covering. It was a matter of business and efficiency, rather than a matter of artwork and creativity. As a print journalist, I want to create a piece, rather than to just report it. I want to take pride in each and every story I report and write. I want to say that there are no stories I wasted, no stories I wished I hadn’t written. I want my career to be more like a 16-game football season, and less like a 162-game baseball season. I want everything to matter. This was not the kind of outlook I gained after four months working at NBC.

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I took a class my sophomore year entitled “Media Criticism” with Don Wycliff, Notre Dame’s former Assistant Director of News and Information and formerly a journalist at the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. One of our assignments, each week, was to watch as much of a nightly news broadcast (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, CNN, and the like) in addition to reading the New York Times, to get a good sense of the news going on that particular week, and to discuss whether there were any interesting patterns emerging regarding the coverage. Reading The Times wasn’t too difficult to keep up on, but trying to catch the nightly news was quite a task, with all of my work and they fact that many college students simply don’t have time to watch television at that time of the day, if at all.

Reflecting back on my experiences this course, I’ve realized precisely why our brand journalism is dying, and precisely why I want to stick with my dreams given the depressing economic climate and the turn to much cheaper and more ubiquitous news gathering (and thus, less specialized and less compensated). We have a duty, as journalists, to be responsible to our fellow citizens. We have a duty to be fair, informed, and insightful. Learning how to analyze the media and the way it presents us the news makes us more informed as citizens, and it helps as a checks and balances system against the media.

At the same time, however, the 21st century media culture, and American culture in general possesses an acute, highly-developed self-awareness and hyper-sensitivity. This is the culture of meta-journalism. Oftentimes, the bigger story is how a particular media outlet covered a story rather than the story itself. Journalists have become celebrities, never out of the grasp of bloggers or other media commentators who watch and log their every move. This is killing the news business, because there is no demand for news; indeed, the focus has shifted from news-makers to news-gatherers. That is why we get our news faster than we can get a Big Mac; the news we want to hear about has become less substantive and more superficial, akin to the way a Big Mac is less substantive and more superficial than a nice juicy steak. In this culture of hyper self-awareness, we have, in a sense, become oblivious to what we are doing. Newspapers and news broadcasts no longer work as a model because they aren’t the ones doing the reporting in demand; instead, online reporters and bloggers are reporting on the newspapers and news broadcasts. The old media has shifted, from the first to the third person. They are no longer our fellow citizens, our family, a part of the collective “we”. They have become the part of the collective “they”. And as we move forward in the 21st century, “we” are dying — a slow, painful, penniless death.