Unit 5. The Media the lessons of breaking news coverage can make your newsroom better every day

Ask the staff of almost any newsroom when they are at their best, and you’ll usually hear:

When news is breaking.

Why?

Because everyone comes together, they'll say. Ideas come from everywhere and everyone. We try things. And for once, we’re certain that we’re working on coverage that our community needs.

So here’s my question:

If they know these ingredients contribute to their best work, why can’t they adopt them all the time?

What lessons can they take from their coverage of breaking news that they can apply to their everyday coverage? How can they collaborate more, create a more involved and inclusive atmosphere, take more risks and produce coverage that more often connects with their community?

Here are some of the lessons I learnt:

Just go talk with people.

Watch or read any news report these days and you’ll see what happens when journalists under great pressure to produce turn to the same reliable (and predictable) sources over and over again. We hear some of our community’s voices a lot; we rarely — or never — hear others. So if our ongoing objective is to produce coverage that truly reflects the community, why not throw out the old playbook, the one with all of those tried, true and willing-to-take-your-call sources, go out and just talk with people — especially people who “go unrepresented” in your coverage?

Stretch your ambitions.

The great thing about ambition is that every time you successfully stretch yourself, your belief in yourself and your staff grows. Before you know it, you are attempting and achieving more than you once thought possible.

When your staff is focused on today’s coverage, you think ahead.

Every veteran of breaking news coverage knows that with each passing day, maintaining a high level of coverage gets more challenging. Fatigue sets in. Bureaucracies clam up. Explaining the “why” is more difficult than reporting the “what.”

Be in the mix.

Managers who know what’s going on and who know their people, can offer help in the right measure. They can support without dictating. They can limit their second-guessing. They can create an environment of trust.

How do you achieve that balance? For starters:

• Offer more questions than answers.

• Listen more than you talk.

• Be accessible to your staff — as predictably as possible.

Seems to me the manager’s most satisfying moment as a decision-maker is when you can simply support your staff’s plan of action. Sure, sometimes you’ll feel the need to take things in a different direction, but play that card too often and you’ll train your staff to wait for your decision — a sure sign that their development has stopped dead.

Bottom line: Don't wait for big breaking news to do the things that help your staff do their best work.

The death of 'he said, she said ' journalism

The New York Times responds to a candidate who breaks all the rules by discarding some of its own.

Last Saturday, The New York Times published an extraordinary story. What made the story extraordinary wasn’t the event the Times covered. What made it extraordinary was the way the Times covered it.

On its front page, top right—the most precious space in American print journalism—the Times wrote about Friday’s press conference in which Donald Trump declared that a) he now believed Barack Obama was a US citizen, b) he deserved credit for having established that fact despite rumors to the contrary and c) Hillary Clinton was to blame for the rumors. Traditionally, when a political candidate assembles facts so as to aggrandize himself and belittle his opponent, “objective” journalists like those at the Times respond with a “he said, she said” story.

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Such stories, according to the NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, follow this formula: “There’s a public dispute. The dispute makes news. No real attempt is made to assess clashing truth claims in the story … The symmetry of two sides making opposite claims puts the reporter in the middle between polarized extremes.”

For an example of such a story, consider the way the Times covered George W. Bush’s claim, during his campaign against John Kerry, that Saddam Hussein had worked closely with Al Qaeda. “Bush and Cheney Talk Strongly of Qaeda Links with Hussein,” noted a Times headline on June 18, 2004. Why were Bush and Cheney raising the subject? Because the day before, the 9/11 Commission had reported that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda did not have a “collaborative relationship.” Nonetheless, the Times reported Bush’s claims and Kerry’s response as equally valid. Bush himself had helped create the Commission to provide an authoritative, nonpartisan account of the events leading up to 9/11. Yet the Times refused to grant its view any more weight than Bush’s own. It refused to render any judgment about what was true.

Some of the headlines about Trump’s press conference followed in that tradition. “Trump finally says Obama born in U.S., blames Clinton for controversy,” declared USA Today’s headline. The AP headline announced, “Reversing course, Trump admits Obama was born in the US.” (In the body of the stories themselves, to be fair, AP and USA Today acknowledged the falseness of Trump’s claims).

But the Times, once a champion practitioner of the “he said, she said” campaign story, discarded it with astonishing bluntness. The Times responded to Trump’s press conference by running a “News Analysis,” a genre that gives reporters more freedom to explain a story’s significance. But “News Analysis” pieces generally supplement traditional news stories. On Saturday, by contrast, the Times ran its “News Analysis” atop Page One while relegating its news story on Trump’s press conference to page A10. Moreover, “News Analysis” stories generally offer context. They don’t offer thundering condemnation.

Yet thundering condemnation is exactly what the Times story provided. Its headline read, “Trump Gives Up a Lie But Refuses to Repent.” Not “falsehood,” which leaves open the possibility that Trump was merely mistaken, but “lie,” which suggests, accurately, that Trump had every reason to know that what he was saying about Obama’s citizenship was false.

The article’s text was even more striking. It read like an opinion column. It began by reciting the history of Trump’s campaign to discredit Obama’s citizenship. “It was not true in 2011,” began the first paragraph. “It was not true in 2012,” began the second paragraph. “It was not true in 2014,” began the third paragraph. Then, in the fourth paragraph: “It was not true, any of it.” The article called Trump’s claim that he had put to rest rumors about Obama’s citizenship “a bizarre new deception” and his allegation that Clinton had fomented them “another falsehood.” Then, in summation, it declared that while Trump has “exhausted an army of fact checkers with his mischaracterizations, exaggerations and fabrications,” the birther lie was particularly “insidious” because it “sought to undo the embrace of an African American president by the 69 million voters who elected him.”

By that point, I had begun to cheer.

A certain etiquette has long governed the relationship between presidential candidates and the elite media. Candidates stretch the truth, but try not to be too blatant about it. Candidates appeal to bigotry, but subtly. In turn, journalists respond with a delicacy of their own. They quote partisans rather than saying things in their own words. They use euphemisms like “polarizing” and “incendiary,” instead of “racist” and “demagogic.”

Previous politicians have exploited this system. But Trump has done something unprecedented. He has so brazenly lied, so nakedly appealed to bigotry, and so frontally challenged the rule of law that he has made the elite media’s decorum absurd. He’s turned highbrow journalists into referees in a World Wrestling Entertainment match.

Last Saturday, the Times answered Trump’s challenge. He’s changed the rules, so it did, too. The next step is the debates. Since Trump has largely stopped giving interviews to anyone except campaign sycophants and celebrity lightweights, the debates may serve as his last encounter with actual journalists. Those journalists — Lester Holt, Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper and Chris Wallace — must be prepared to confront Trump in ways they’ve never confronted a candidate before. The more audaciously he lies, the more audaciously they must tell the truth. The risks of doing so are tremendous. The rewards are being able to say that when Donald Trump threatened American liberal democracy like no candidate in modern history, you met his challenge square on.