Posts for 'Roles of Journalist' Category

Although it seems less common these days, there are still a fair number of us public relations practitioners who enter the business by crossing over from the journalist’s side of the notebook. When you make that transition, you become something of an oracle.  Colleagues and clients expect you to be the walking, talking answer to the Rubik’s cube puzzle of how to gain the attention of the media.  If only it were that simple!

Landing media placements is at least as much about art as it is science. And despite the prevalence of social media (I would argue that BECAUSE of the explosion of social media) landing the right media placements is still important. First and foremost, of course, I believe it's about the quality of your story. But it’s also about you and who you are as a person engaged in public relations — whether as a company principal or (especially) as a PR professional.  So just what did I learn about succeeding with journalists in two decades of writing and editing for newspapers, magazines and news services?

First of all, a PR pro doesn’t need a journalistic pedigree to succeed with journalists. But you do have to possess something else: knowledge of what journalists really want from PR people.  I’m not talking about what journalists want from your story – that’s another subject.

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As the newspaper industry weathers the upheavals wrought by modern technology and 24 hour cable news continues to blur the line between tabloid gossip and real reporting, it is all the more important for university journalism departments to impress upon students the importance - even the necessity - of journalistic ethics.

In the Information Age, the line between what is acceptable reporting and what is not often becomes murky; academic concepts of ethics can seem quaint and irrelevant in the real world of news reporting. The most effective journalism programs blend case studies with concept and theory, giving students an opportunity to think deeply about the role of ethics in modern reporting.

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Jay Rosen points us to an article out of France that takes a stab at presenting what a modern internet-era newsroom should look like. The point that I find most interesting, that helped clarify a few different ideas for me, is that it splits "journalism" into three distinct categories, all of which have a role in the newsroom:

1. Reporters -- who go out and do first person reporting -- creating original stories, not just reposting rewritten wire copy. 2. Columnists -- who "start conversations and give stories another perspective."   3. Curators -- who "'cover' the news by sorting, verifying and editing live everything good existing on the web and in the media. They make link journalism, they make the news more accessible."

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Earlier today, I posted a story about the great season Casey Crosby is having at West Michigan. Toward the end, I made a point about how with young pitchers you are always concerned about health and made reference to Crosby leaving his most recent start after the third inning to drive the point home.

Well, not long after the post went up, there was a comment from somebody posting as Casey's brother - his brother, I'm sure; I'm just playing it safe - stating that his early exit wasn't an injury concern. Rather, he has been working on a two-seam fastball lately and had split open his finger from throwing the new pitch.

I checked everywhere I could think of that traffics in Tiger minor league news and only saw mention of his leaving early. There were no details. Was this a scoop? Naturally, my first instinct once I got home was to highlight the news. However, since I didn't want to end up on the AP wire again, this time as the boob blogger who bought into a bogus tip, I figured I'd better do some digging.

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Fiji's pioneer journalist Stan Ritova has died. He passed away at the North Shore Hospital in Sydney after failing to gain consciousness following a stroke on Friday. Mr Ritova was the first local journalist to become Fiji Times' chief reporter, first editor of the first Fiji Sun and editor of the Daily Post. He is survived by his wife Seini, daughter Ellen and six sons – Moses, Daniel, Stanley, George, Charles and Trevor.

I WORKED closely with Stan Ritova during the eventful period I spent at the Fiji Times. We also had frequent professional contact in our later careers. Stan earned a special place in the annals of Fiji journalism; he went where no other local had been before, and was a worthy winner of the 2007 Fiji Awards for Media Excellence (FAME) Lifetime Achievement Award.

As a 19-year-old, armed with just his enthusiasm and natural ability, Stan led the way for locals who aspired to become full-fledged professional reporters. Eventually, he would be famous throughout Fiji. He covered in words and pictures some of the great stories of an era:

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In times of great change, it is especially important that some things stay the same.  In May 1921, the great Manchester Guardian editor CP Scott wrote a leading article to mark the centenary of the paper. CP's much quoted essay has, in the words of one commentator, "endured as the ultimate statement of values for a free press". The article, published under the headline "A Hundred Years", is still recognised around the world as the blueprint for independent journalism.

CP used the centenary leader to set out the values he thought should inform journalism and the running of a newspaper business. Though we have to reinterpret them for the modern age, these values remain unchanged and undiluted as the guiding principles of our journalism and our company.

The article is filled with now-famous assertions: that "comment is free, but facts are sacred"; that newspapers have "a moral as well as a material existence"; that "the voice of opponents no less than that of friends has a right to be heard".

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Or coffee! Maybe coffee will save journalism! In June, MSNBC signed a deal to make Starbucks the official caffeinated beverage of its talk show Morning Joe. In 2008 a chain of TV affiliates cut a deal to place McDonald's iced coffee on anchor desks.
(Watch an interview with Joe Scarborough.)

Those who can't sell coffee can try to sell Kaffeeklatsches. The Washington Post was embarrassed this month by a leak of its plans to charge up to $25,000 for lobbyists and executives to sponsor "salons" with public officials and the reporters who cover the fields they work in, like health care. "Spirited? Yes," a flyer said of the promised talks. "Confrontational? No." Journalism? Someday it just might be.

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Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, had some old news for the science journalists at the Knight science journalism symposium in Boston.

The role of the journalist is changing in an age where the old metaphor of gate-keeping no longer applies, he told them. This is pretty obvious. More interesting is a discussion of the new roles for journalists.

Rosenstiel outlined four potential roles:

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Watch five hours of US cable news, and on average you will see around 35 minutes on election campaigns, another 36 minutes on US foreign policy, and 26 minutes on crime — but only about one minute on science and technology, slightly more on the environment, and only a little over 3 minutes on medicine and health care. This is not just an issue with cable: science fares little better in other forms of television, radio, or print news, according to the Pew Research Center's The State of the News Media 2008 report, released on 17 March.

It would be a mistake to get too alarmed about this analysis. Science news in the United States has indeed been squeezed to around 2% of the total since the events of 11 September 2001. But it was never that high, hovering around 4–6% from the mid-1970s until 2001. And the drop does not reflect a falling public interest in science, as much as the media's increased emphasis on foreign policy, war and the homeland: the diversity of US news coverage has decreased across the board since 9/11.

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Some 15,000 U.S.journalists have left theire jobs in the last couple of years. The New News Ecology means new jobs, new tools, new relationships, new businesses.
Journalism's very survival -- at least its values and purpose -- depends on the ability of news organizations -- and citizens -- to adapt to a dramatically evolving landscape. Who -- what -- will emerge as the journalism leaders of the future if the legacy organizations fail to cross the chasm to the new news ecology?

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