In April, a group of students and career journalists in town for the Society of Professional Journalists conference visited Ideastream Public Media’s offices in Downtown Cleveland.
We had dinner and talked about all the wonderful things you can do if you choose a career in journalism: At Ideastream, we produce TV, radio, news, social media, arts, entertainment and engaged journalism.
That means reporters and producers shoot video, fly drones, cut audio and make documentaries. There are all kinds of fun things that students can specialize in as they are starting out.
I talked about what we call enterprise journalism, the type that comes out of a reporter’s curiosity and spade work, rather than through a press release or an event.
Covering a trial is breaking news coverage. Reporting that council people used a private text thread to threaten retaliation against a group that complained about inappropriate behavior by one of their colleagues — that’s enterprise.
Enterprise isn’t always serious. It can also be fun or surprising or delightful.
After the presentations, a student told me he liked a framed quote I kept on my desk.
It reads, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” It’s a quote from Ida B. Wells, the journalist and activist who covered lynchings in the American South in the 1890s.
In 1892, Wells wrote an editorial in her Memphis newspaper, The Free Speech, opposing lynching. It caused a riot, and a mob destroyed her office.
Journalism can be serious business. And it can be fun, too. It is fun to tell stories and fly drones and interview people. It’s a rush to be able to ask the governor a question and have him answer it.
But that doesn’t adequately describe this profession — the only one mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.
Here’s what I should have said to that group of aspiring journalists: Journalism done right is about listening to lots of different people tell you in a million different ways what they need, know, understand and want. Then, take that and provide people with the truth, the real story and a fair shake.
You have to do this while balancing respect for people’s privacy, autonomy, opinions and points of view.
You have to make it interesting and useful, even when you're tired or bored or sad.
You will work weird hours.
It is incredibly difficult to do this right.
It is no easy thing to report something controversial that will make people angry.
You will have to ask powerful people questions that they do not like or that are embarrassing. You will be asked to do this regularly.
People will complain bitterly about your work. They will call your boss and tell them that you were unfair. Sometimes they’ll call your boss’s boss.
They will say that you are wrong.
Sometimes that will be because they want to discredit you. But sometimes it will be because you actually are wrong. Reporters, after all, are human. We are not infallible.
When you are wrong, you will be duty-bound to publicly admit it.
The older journalists in the room we were addressing already knew this. It’s our job to train and fortify — not just inspire — the next generation of journalists.
Because we are part of a generations-long history project that’s been going on since the Acta Durina was published in Rome before 59 B.C. Newspapers, as we middle-aged people now have to describe them to our children, popped up in Germany in 1609.
The opposition to journalism is older than our country itself.
In 1671, Virginia Governor William Berkeley wrote: "I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing and I hope we shall not have, these hundred years, for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both."
Authorities put the first American news sheet out of business in 1690 after just four days because they resented the publisher's report that English military forces had allied themselves with “miserable” savages.
Journalism students, this is what you’re invited to become a part of. It’s wonderful. But there can be a cost.
I gave that student journalist my sign with the Ida B. Wells quote.
I hope he hangs it somewhere, and it gives him clarity and courage as he helps chronicle the next chapter of our history.
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