ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, March 11, 1997 TAG: 9703110083
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: reporter's notebook
SOURCE: MARK CLOTHIER
Overall, being a reporter is pretty cool.
The pay isn't great, but it's not bad. And the work, while sometimes hectic, is fun and varied. In my six months, I've written about a missing cat, national radio and TV shows in town, the "smart" road, disease and one Disney fanatic.
No Pulitzer-bait in the bunch, but it keeps me interested.
But if there's a downside, it's The Question. Most reporters hear it. Few have its answer. I know I don't. I found out last week.
It's this: Why, when there's so much good that happens every day, do reporters just focus on the bad?
I heard it in a fairly innocuous setting. I'd gone to a Christiansburg school to talk to a group of second-graders about the reporting process: how we hear about stories, which ones we decide to cover and how we write those we do. My prepared remarks lasted about five minutes. (We get calls. We follow things. We talk to people.)
The brevity was, in part, because of my sadly lacking public-speaking skill and the interests of the students and one of the teachers. The kids were more curious about the production end of things: how we print the paper.
Specifically, they were curious about how we reproduce color photos. I had a visual aid with me that showed a newspaper page with the primary-colored layers of film that, when placed on top of each other, make a full-color photo. I think. How this translates to the actual printing process, I'm not sure. But one of the two teachers pieced together a pretty plausible explanation from the prop and what little I offered. (Thanks again.)
After the color-photo explanation debacle, I opened the floor to other questions, which is when it came.
The other teacher there wondered why we only wrote about "bad things." (An example of "bad" was the coverage of the Montgomery County school system's trouble keeping a superintendent.) She said "good things" happen in classrooms all over every day and we rarely, if ever, write about them.
I offered her a couple of lame rebuttals, looked at how my audience's second-grade eyes were starting to glaze and asked if we could continue our discussion afterward.
She agreed and I went back to fielding questions about the printing process.
Later, I told her our perspective: how we look for stories that have as wide a range of interest as possible. If we write a story about one classroom doing daily good, maybe the teachers in that school care and maybe the parents of the students, but few other people. And teachers in other schools would be upset: They're doing the same things, so why did we focus on just one?
Next I tried to change her frame of reference. I asked her to try to think of education in terms of any other publicly funded operation.
For example, the White House.
Do you want to read about Bill Clinton routinely clocking 16-hour workdays and seven-day work weeks? Isn't that just part of the job? Aren't you more interested in hearing about historic welfare reform and Dialing for Dollars on White House phones?
News, as I see it, is extraordinary good or ordinary bad. The good, as harsh as it may seem, is expected. It still gets highlighted every so often, but reporters - and people - tend to focus on the not-as-obvious.
This seemed to have little impact, and the second-grade natives were getting restless. So we kind of implicitly agreed to disagree and shook hands.
Hopefully, I offered a perspective she hadn't considered. I'm not sure.
I know I picked up a few things. Next time I speak in front of students, I'll bring a few more props: more visual aids means fewer tough questions.
LENGTH: Medium: 70 linesby CNB