The first law of reporting
by Stephanie Piper
When I heard about Jayson Blair's New York Times scam, my first thought was not of duplicity, but of sheer laziness. I couldn't imagine another reason for sitting home in Brooklyn and faking trips to Palestine, West Virginia and Bethesda, Maryland, and making up stories about people he never set eyes on, let alone interviewed.
Laziness is a fatal flaw in a reporter. Mediocre writing can be edited. Sloppy leads can be fixed. But all the copy editors in the world can't save a secondhand story, or transpose fiction into fact. Reporting is a business in which you suit up and show up, and neither fatigue nor hangover nor personal crises are supposed to keep you from your appointed rounds.
That's the way I learned it, anyway. I spent most of my working life as a reporter and editor, first at a chain of weeklies and then at a daily newspaper. In the beginning, I covered cat shows and school picnics and, for one endless summer, weddings. Awash in seed pearls and Brussels lace, I dreamed of real news. I longed for the police beat, or city hall. I wanted to uncover corruption at the highest level, or blow the whistle on illegal hiring practices somewhere. I wanted to make a difference.
In the end, I found my voice in feature writing. I got to try on people's lives for a few hours, and then go back and write about them. I got to climb six flights in a shabby building and talk to a family of Vietnamese boat people. While I was doing the interview, the family's 10-year-old son took money from a coffee can and went out and bought a bottle of Coke to serve me and the photographer. It was a small moment that became the heart of the story. I have a mental scrapbook full of such moments, and I would not trade it for a Pulitzer Prize.
I got to spend time with a man who made violins out of walnut shells and a woman who took in abandoned babies and a Ringling Brothers clown. I followed child beauty pageant contestants around for a weekend and watched them win and lose and fall apart in hotel rooms. I learned about raising parakeets and training police dogs and why the hairdresser is as close to the confessional as many women ever come.
It would have been hard to fake this stuff. In fact, it would have been a good deal harder to sit at my computer and make it up than it was to actually get in the car and haul out the city map and go. It would also have been a lot less interesting, which was my next thought about Jayson Blair. He seems to have missed so much.
Katherine Anne Porter once said that writing is a craft, and you have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else. Jayson Blair skipped the minor leagues. He interned briefly at the Boston Globe, then catapulted directly to The Newspaper of Record. On reflection, maybe what he needed was to cover some cat shows. Maybe what he needed was to work for a small daily under the watchful eye of a chain-smoking city editor who did not suffer young reporters gladly and figured a 40-hour week was a slacker's schedule.
Maybe he needed a few more years of showing up with an open notebook and an open mind to learn by heart the first law of reporting: Be there.
June 5, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 23
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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