It's the start of the fall semester at the college where I teach, and as always I'm telling my students that journalism is about mastering two broad skill sets: reporting and writing.
Reporting, I tell them, is the gathering of information through interviews, background research and so on. Writing, of course, is the process of putting together the information you've gathered into a concise and coherent news story.
Many students sign up for introductory journalism courses because they love to write, and there's nothing wrong with that. Talented writers definitely have an advantage in this business.
But journalism in the end is more about reporting than writing. It's about digging up information and getting people to tell you, a total stranger, important things about their lives.
Ask any editor whether she'd sooner hire a great reporter or a great writer, and nine times out of 10 she'll pick the reporter.
Why? Because an editor can clean up a story that's poorly written. She can fix the buried lede and the AP style errors.
She can't compensate for thin, watery reporting.
Now, the great thing about reporting is that it's not rocket science. Good reporting is mostly about hard work - getting out into the community and talking to lots of people, going through records and documents and finding information online.
In other words, anyone with the drive and motivation can be a good reporter if they're willing to put in the time.
But there's one quality in particular that's common to nearly all great reporters, one that unfortunately is lacking in some of my students - curiosity.
Great reporters are naturally curious. They want to know not just how the world works but why it works the way it does. They're interested in everything. Hang out with a gang of reporters at the local bar after work and you'll hear them gabbing about politics, current events, sports, music, literature, sex and even, occasionally, journalism. They may cover specialized beats, but more often than not they're generalists in their passions.
They're also inveterate readers, information omnivores. They're poring over the back of the cereal box in the morning, scanning newspapers and websites during the day and settling down with a good novel before bed. Great reporters are always reading, partly because it's important for their work but also because they derive enormous pleasure from simply learning.
On the other hand, some - and I emphasize some - of my students display an amazing lack of curiosity - about the world, their country, even their community. They know little about domestic politics or current events, and news from abroad might as well be from another planet as far as they're concerned. Moammar Gadhafi? Who's that?
Instead, the guys are typically interested in professional sports, the girls in celebrities (sounds sexist but there it is). They're also obsessed with the comings and goings of those in their own social circles, an obsession that is aided and abetted by Facebook (one of my students has over 5,000 Facebook friends.)
But mostly, they're interested in themselves. They are the navel-gazing "me" generation redux. Ask them to write something about the Arab Spring and you'll be lucky to get a sentence or two. Ask them to write a personal essay about their own lives and you'll get page after page. They love to talk, especially about themselves. It's listening they're not so good at.
Of course, aren't we all, in the end, pretty self-absorbed? Probably, but my point is this: These are students who signed up for a journalism class, which presumably you'd only do if you were thinking about majoring in journalism.
And journalists, after all, deal in the twin commodities of news and information. So is it too much to expect that someone in such a class might have a passing interest in current events?
Yet at the beginning of every semester, I ask each class of 15 students one question: How many of you read a newspaper or news website every day?
The usual response? Three or four hands in the air, if that.
So why are they in a journalism class? I suspect it's because they have some vague notion of journalism being a glamorous and lucrative career choice (hah!), that they imagine themselves at an anchor desk somewhere, dressed to the nines, reading off a Teleprompter.
Not all my students are like this. Some see their first byline in the student newspaper and it's like the proverbial light bulb sparking to life overhead. They've been bitten by the journalism bug and from that moment on they're newsroom lifers. They make my job the best in the world.
As for the rest, I know that few will ever become journalists; for them, my class is just a temporary detour on whatever path in life they eventually choose.
Still, I want them to try being a reporter, just once. I want them to interview somebody, and to really listen to the person they're interviewing, then take that interview, and any other information they've gathered, and turn it into a news story.
Report, then write. Do it once. See if something happens, if something is sparked. If not, walk away. Drop the class. Otherwise, stick around. Stick around and see what happens this semester.
