I almost never blog anymore. There is no time. I work for a newspaper writing 40 plus hours a week and I have another job. I’m going to venture into fiction soon and blogging just seems like isolated whining to me.
I’m not an individualist and I hate reading people’s ramblings about their own personal life without any context of what is going on in the world. That being said, I’m going to do it myself… right now.
I’ve been a journalist for one year now and I’ve done some good work, but I can’t say I’ve made the progress I’d hoped for. Earlier today I was talking to an editor from the Houston Chronicle about an article on organ transplants. For a while now, I have been trying to find a family to follow as they wait on the organ donor list. I’ve cast a wide net, using facebook sites to search. I eventually found a family with a 14 month child on the donor list who moved from Tennessee to Houston so they could wait for an organ. Families move every year to be in the right place for organ donations. Many of those families will go through the darkest times of their life with only the support of others waiting on the list. Every year thousands of people die on the donors list.
My idea was to use this family as the protagonist for a series of articles that explores the organ donation system. I gifted the idea to the Houston Chronicle and they asked me why is this family’s story interesting? First of, it’s a 14 month-year-old waiting for an organ transplant, whose family has moved to Houston in a desperate attempt to save their daughter.
Second of all, her story alone isn’t all the significance. It’s the entire picture. Newspapers ask why they fail and this is exactly why. The milenial generation has reached its fill of stand alone information. What we want is accumulated information that looks at the big picture. The television program the Wire is a great example. And also from a business perspective everyone is giving stand alone information. It’s like network television before HBO. There are a million opportunities out there, but no one is taking a shot because they are too cowardly.
Instead the industry produces content in the same lazy quick turnover way it has for generations — a thousand stories that in aggregate equal zero — but uses technology and the result is still no one cares. Value comes from the substance of the story — the understanding of humanity — not the packaging. Once you have a great story you can chop it up any way you want for any kind of package, but you have to get the substance first.
There are simple reasons why the industry focuses on quick flip stuff. Firstly, it’s so incredibly easy to write an article about what happened at a murder or any one time event. Most of these stories follow the same uncreative pattern. so and so was killed. it was the such and such murder this year. No one saw it coming blah blah blah inverted pyramid into irrelevance.
If journalism is simple that means the people up top get to keep more of the money because there is less competition for talent. The second you let people excel you lose control of the whole industry. But also from a human perspective the status quo requires less controversy or frustration. Most editors would rather hire someone that does an alright job with the stories they’re handed than someone who does a fantastic job, but covers their own stories. It’s counter intuitive because it makes their job easier, but it’s true because Americans are obsessed with control.
Finally, the whole country is fucked up, so that makes journalism hard. Recently, I had my first foray with politics and the industry. I covered a murder trial that involved an elderly man and his five-year-old adopted step-daughter. The girl died with a bag over head in 1995. At the time of her death, it was not ruled a homicide. At a standard cold case review the event was brought back to trial. Ultimately, the elderly man took a plea deal — against his lawyer’s wishes — partly because of poor health. Some coroner’s reports said it wasn’t a homicide. But the judge gave the man a light sentence and the prosecutor’s attorney took a hit in popularity. As a result, he contacted a soft news journalist in Peoria — one of the bigger towns in Illinois — who chopped up my stories and altered them so that it was a battle of good and evil. The standard cold case review became “I couldn’t let this crime go unpunished.” The coroner and the local police chief jumped on the issue too. I had talked to all these people during the trial and they all said the same thing: the public doesn’t understand how the system works anymore. They think the real world is like CSI and that creates unrealistic expectations and makes it hard to solve cases, but then as soon as the simplified reality can benefit them they exploit it.
The whole nation has become a part of a constant election to the extant that it and everyone in it is incapable of empirically evaluating evidence or creating complicated social systems. Instead, everything flows straight from beliefs, which are never scrutinized because facts change to fit beliefs and not vice versa. If the elderly man is suspected of murder and the good district attorney says the man is a villain and he’s a hero then that is true and he should be re-elected.
I don’t blame the soft news journalist for getting sucked into this bullshit. They have to eat and journalism doesn’t pay. I understand them. They probably started off with ambitions, but when they faced road blocks at every direction they decided they could make money by peddling other people’s bullshit. Sources don’t want to talk to a journalist on a story where they can’t be sure of the outcome, but if they can spin something into a puff piece about how great they are then every government official wants to talk.
I can imagine the soft news journalist in his youth talking to an editor.
“Sir, I have this big story about how inner city crime and inner city education overlap and what can be done to fix the problem.” the soft news journalist said.
“Hmm, that’s a good idea, but do you think maybe we could just write a story about how so and so has fixed all those problems and it is really simple. You could do that in one day. Just get quotes.”
After that day, the journalist was easy to get along with. Other journalists where better at reporting and writing, but they asked too many questions or became frustrated and joined think tanks, election campaigns or PR firms. Since the journalist was easy to get a long with he grew up to become an editor. And one day he had an ambitious young journalist who wanted to examine the mental health industry and how mental health affects our nation. On that day, he told that young journalist that no one cares about mental health like he was programmed to years before.
The young journalist told him that tastes can change. The people don’t care because they don’t know.
“It’s our job to adapt to changes in the world and illustrate those changes to the public, so they can make more informed decisions,” he said.
The editor, former ambitious journalist, ignored him.
“I need you to cover the high school musical,” he said. “Our readers want to know about that.”
Congratulations on your award from the AP. Looks like in-depth reporting still gets recognized sometimes. Your autism articles are obviously backed by a ton of research and interviews. My favorites were the one that focused on John Mattan and the one about Thompson’s classroom. I’m glad Stacia Mattan stood up for you when that lady went on the attack about vaccines. It’s obvious your work is having an impact on people.
Thank you. It’s nice to hear kind words. I often find myself frustrated as I try to distant myself from what has been done and move toward justice. I should reform this blog to a stoic’s struggle for universal justice. It’s a new world in need of new voices. Have you been writing?
Nothing significant…mostly isolated whining. I’m sending out some freelance stuff, but I don’t like to talk about it in case it goes nowhere. I’ve been reading a lot and researching organizations to volunteer with. My feelings about my writing switch between inflated ego and total self-loathing. So it’s hard to say if that will go anywhere. It’s hard to find a meaningful place in the world. I hope you do. Does your job let you freelance for other publications? Are you planning on staying there for long?
I’m actually leaving soon. I’m probably going back to grad school. I know how you feel about finding meaning in this world. I think the world is lost. The only solution might be for young people to create the meaning.