Michael Brown  On Reporting


GOOD REPORTING VS. GOOD WRITING: SUBJECTIVE JUDGEMENT

Good is a value judgement. The term which I try to have our students to stay away from is "good," "bad," "pretty," "ugly," that's a value judgement. I'm not even interested in that. The "good" is determined by who reads it. You have to look at your readership, you have to follow what your readers tell you. You also must use your news judgement. "Good" is very subjective. That is very subjective, like beauty. When we say, good reporting, actually what we're saying, is that reporter following those technicals as prescribed by journalism school or journalists. That's what we mean. I think that what we need to be using is that term. Now, is that reporter able to translate those technicals into writing, and communicate to the reader, so that the reader now is able to appreciate the technicals of that reporting.

FOLLOWING RUMORS TO FACT

Someone calls you and says, "Hey, look, you know what? We found out that there's been two deaths over here in this building in Chicago Housing Authority from the elevators. Elevators never work. Goodbye." They give you the address. What do you do? That's a rumor. The first thing you do is you go to your editor. You must now sit down and say, "Okay, what is the first thing I need to do?" Because the first thing that we talked about here is rumors have basis in fact. That's the bottom line here. Now you have to run a rumor to ground. How we gonna run this specific rumor to ground? The first thing you want to do is, "Hey, I have this address, let me go over there and see if these elevators work." You go over to the building, you have the address. You see the elevator when you get there, it's working. Hmm... It's working. But that doesn't mean it's working all the time, because we understand how public housing elevators work. So now what do you do? Who do you talk to? Now you're at the Chicago Housing Authority, who do you talk to? And what do you ask them? First, you might want to talk to the residents. There's always gonna be residents coming and going in a Chicago Public Housing area, or public housing apartment building. Also, there's always gonna be kids around. That's a good source. Kids know what's happening all the time. If someone's come off the elevator, you might want to ask them a question about that elevator. Ask a couple of children about that elevator. Now what's your next source? You're gonna find some good stuff about that elevator if that person knows who died in this elevator last week. You might want to go to that person's apartment and find out if in fact this really did happen. You might want to ask the janitors of that building. Some very specific questions about the maintenance. You might not get anything, you might want to ask security guards. Now you got some information, what do you do with it? It's time to head back to the office and talk to your editor. "Hey, here's what we have here." Also now you get some collaborative information, where do you go? Run this rumor to the ground. See now we have some basic facts, we know this elevator works periodically. It breaks up and down, back and forth. People could be surfing on this elevator. That's a term that's used where children get on top of the elevator and ride it up and down. That's called surfing. All right, so did this person die from surfing? Or did this person die through an accident? If the person died from surfing, that is no fault of the companies. Maybe the door should not have been so easily accessible, but yet, somebody's gonna have to take responsibility that child ride up and down the elevator now. But if he died, he still died. So now we ran that to the ground, possibly. Now what's the next step? Now I might want to call the local police district because they have the meat wagons. They're the ones who pick up dead bodies. With the information I found out at the local tenement, I now can call the police department and say, "Hey, did this happen over here?" Talk with the police commander, the neighborhood relations sergeant, the beat representative, find out. Hmm... I also can go to the Cook County Examiner's Office, I can get a log of autopsies. I can do all this within a few hours. Now I'm ready to confront the Chicago Housing Authority or the owner of that building 'cause I have enough information now, I've ran it to the ground, I'm ready to confront, or I'm ready to trash the story. Either or. We're ready to go to press.