Earning the right

You have to earn the right to be called a journalist.

When I speak with groups of people who like to think they've already earned that right, I get the impression that some have skewed priorities: They worry too much about how they structure their sentences – and not enough about how they structure their stories. They apparently have forgotten a basic tenet of journalism: Reporting comes first.

Reporting involves asking questions, listening to the answers – and then, based on those answers, asking more questions, maybe different questions than those originally on a list of potentials. Many of the stories that appear in print today are well written, but they are bad stories because they aren't well reported, they leave questions unanswered.

Newspapers are about credibility, and credibility is lost when readers are left wondering. Often reporters don't dig. They don't challenge. They don't double-check or contact additional sources or look up facts in archives or reference books. Some of today's reporters are too trusting, or too lazy – or both.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, I read hundreds of stories on the search for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. I kept waiting for a reporter to ask one of the many officials who handled news briefings why the U.S. government was certain that bin Laden was there.

After all, it was obvious that – terrorist or not – bin Laden wasn't stupid. He had to be pretty smart to pull off what he was accused of doing with four U.S. commercial aircraft. So how could we be sure that – a few days before Sept. 11 – he hadn't shaved his beard, tossed away his headdress, bought some three-piece suits and moved to London or Paris?

It wasn't likely that he did that, of course. But it could have happened. Why didn't someone ask if any official associated with a U.S. intelligence agency had at least considered the possibility? If anyone did ask that question, I didn't see it or the answer in a story in a mainstream newspaper by mid-December.

That's reporting. You ask questions. You exhaust the possibilities. You don't leave readers wondering or scratching their heads.

Assuming that all the right questions have been asked and answered (or, if they haven't been answered, the reporter is prepared to explain why not), the next step is to produce a readable story. Only then is it time to worry about sentence structure, phrase structure, word structure.

And there is plenty to worry about.

Other than lack of reporting, where do reporters go wrong? For starters, in these areas:

Work is often cliché-ridden. Reporters might rely on jargon, catch phrases or combinations of words that they have read in other stories. Or they try too hard to reflect what they interpret as pop culture, tossing trendy words, catchy phrases, film titles or lines from songs into their stories, not understanding that copycat work is not clever work.

Maybe they don't understand the role of the adjective and the adverb, which should be used primarily to modify, to qualify, to change - not to describe. Instead of letting strong combinations of nouns and verbs provide description, some reporters pop adjectives or adverbs, perhaps hoping that these will provide shortcuts to communication with readers.

Often reporters forget the fine points of grammar and punctuation: parts of speech, nominative/objective case, singular-plural agreement, indicative/subjunctive mood, sequence of tenses, when to use commas or apostrophes or semicolons. Unfortunately, reporters don't always concentrate; good grammar and punctuation usage are matters of concentration.

Clutter can be a problem, too. Sometimes reporters are willing to use eight words in situations when four will do. They don't appreciate the beauty of brevity. They are often redundant, writing the same thing several times with different words.

Reporters can weaken the language by allowing words with specific meanings to be used as false synonyms for words that are more general. Disinterested is used for uninterested, unique is used for unusual, allusion is used for reference.

I have found that many journalists lack feeling for structure and flow. They drop facts randomly into stories, without understanding the effect that parenthetical placement has on narrative. They don't listen to what they have written.

And, eventually, it gets back to reporting. Too often, reporters are not fair. They allow unnamed sources to make pejorative remarks about associates, colleagues or opponents – then they compound this unprofessional approach by not giving the accused the opportunity to respond.

If reporters would practice the concept of self-editing – taking a critical look at what they've written and re-working it with an objective eye before passing it on to the editing desk – they'd go a long way toward earning the right to be called journalists.