Kurt Loder  On Reporting


STYLE

Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in. I think writers are born. Reporters can be made. Reporting is a craft. Writing is something you're born to do or you're not. And I think a good writer's gonna make it interesting. From the first paragraph it will all be interesting. Just work at it and work at it and work at it. There shouldn't be anything in there that doesn't belong in there that's dull. That should cut it out. And the most important thing you can do is learn to edit yourself. And then go back and rewrite. Rewriting is a large part of the whole job. And get rid of stuff that's not working. Just pare it down until it's a beautiful thing you can hand in, probably late, to your editor.

THE IMPORTANCE OF GOOD ENGLISH

I had a facility for reading, and maybe grew up at a time when schools were better, but I wouldn't want to sit down and talk about gerunds, but I just sort of soaked it up. I know what the structure of the language is. It's very important to know the language. Teachers can make it very boring if they're not good teachers, but it's very important to know it, because you can't be precise without knowing the language and precision is everything. You have to say exactly what you want to say. And the first thing you'll find out if you go into newspapers is an editor will take your stories and just tear them up. And just say, "This is wrong, this belongs down here, this doesn't say what you want to say, remove this," and that's how you learn. I think you learn more, I think back in maybe the '40s, and the '30s and the Front Page days, when newspapers were sort of a romantic institution, there was more of people coming into it who weren't like college English majors. I think they were just people off the streets. Hard-drinking, cigar-smoking guys. But they learned how to write a clear story. And it's not something, anyone can do it, it can be done, if you apply yourself to it. So even if you're failing at English, you know, because you're bored to death, don't let that stop you from being a reporter. It's not necessarily the case.

LAZY REPORTING

Yeah, sure. I spent time in, like, criminal courts, and covering murder trials for papers.

Well, Rolling Stone was, I think, part of the wave in the '70s, there was something called "the new journalism" which really started the New York magazine and Esquire magazine. And the idea there was that you should get the whole story and really dig into it. But a lot of stories don't really have two sides. Now if you're doing a story on Hitler, "Okay, he killed a lot of people, but he liked his dog" there aren't two sides to that story. This is a bad guy. So in some cases, the evidence you finally get is just so overwhelming you have to say this guy's, like, you know, should be done away with. A lot of stories are like that. It shouldn't be just a matter--a lazy reportorial thing to do is to go to both sides, get a statement, say, well, here they are, who knows who's right? If you really dig in, sometimes you can find out who is right. Maybe you can make some difference in the case.

A reporter has to go out and dig in and stuff. You shouldn't have a preconceived notion, but when the evidence just amounts to a point where you can say, "Well, here's the real story, here's the truth, or as close as we're going to get to it," then you should present it as such. I think the idea of objectivity is good up to a point, but you can't just be lazy and say, "Well, make up your own mind. I'm not gonna do the work." Do the work. You'll have a better story.

CAMPUS RADIO STATION NEWS ADVICE

The music business is pervasive in this country. You could look on the lowest local level, you'll find the music business there. It's a matter of promoters, and what promoters are getting to put on concerts, how much profits do they make? Why are you paying so much for tickets? What do you get for that? Why does a T-shirt cost 20 dollars? Always a good question. If you're curious, and you look at something, say, "Why is this?" then you can dig into it and try and find out. There's always a question to me. Life is just full of questions. I think you can't go into it with the idea, "I love Pearl Jam, I wanna just do glowing things about Pearl Jam," 'cause you might dig into their story and find something bad. I doubt it, but you could. You could find some way that managers will sometimes have a hit group and then they'll, like, lean on a record company to sign another group they have which has no talent whatsoever, but that record will come out. While some deserving band can't get a contract. Very interesting to look into this stuff, but you have to be absolutely independent, and you can't let people say, "Well, if you're going to do stories like that, we're not going to give you ads," or something. It's just something you have to be able to stand up for, and the station has to stand up for it too. Takes a lot of fortitude to do that.

TIP OF THE YEAR

The more you, as a journalist, the more you know in life, the better off you are. The more traveling you've done, the more books you've read, the more movies you've seen, the more bars you've gone to, whatever. Everything feeds into what you know about the world. And it just helps you. So the more experience you have, the better off you are.

ADVICE FROM THE STREET

I think the most important thing is to be passionately engaged in what you're doing. If you're passionately in love with something, you're one of the luckiest people in the world, 'cause you can get a job doing something you love to do. Lots of people don't have that, lots of people have to work in factories, lots of people have to do things they hate. If you find something that you love to do and you get employed doing it, your life will just be a breeze by comparison. So follow it, whatever your dream is, follow it. It's very important.