Author: erikeisele

The Fall of American Journalism

Can you guess how the CNN piece went?

I don’t see any value in sensationalism, and that’s what the program I was on was all about. I hung up after the first 15 minutes. Someone from the show called to say they’d lost the connection, and I explained I wasn’t familiar with the show beforehand, but having heard it I couldn’t take part in it. She said she understood, and asked me to explain it to the producer who had asked me on. So I did.

I am a 29-year-old reporter with global aspirations. CNN should be my endgoal. But giving up my commitment to quality reporting isn’t worth it; I would never go work for a program like the one that just had me on (however briefly).

This story is big news. It was on ABC’s Good Morning, and there were eight or 10 television cameras at the press conference this afternoon at the Conway Police Department. But it doesn’t need to be hyped. When one of the biggest names in news is doing the hyping you have to know something is wrong.

I work for a small community paper and contribute to New Hampshire Public Radio — both venues that don’t feel like the news has to be stretched to be valuable to the audience. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to compromise on that. Journalism isn’t just about making money. It’s also about keeping people informed. Scared is not informed. It is a disservice. I have no interest in trumpeting unknowns in order to attract an audience.

If that relegates me to the small-town paper, so be it, but if that is the case it’s a shame. If it takes sensationalism to make it mainstream than journalism is indeed doomed.

But that isn’t the case at all. The New York Times, Washington Post and NPR are consistently excellent news outlets. They play it straight, reporting the news as best they can. There is value in that. It is, in fact, one of the most valuable ingredients in democracy. It scares me what damage is done by the sensationalization of valuable information.

I really only have two things to say after this experience:

  1. Thank you New Hampshire Public Radio, which, when I asked if they were interested in the story said they don’t really cover crime in that way because it comes off as sensational. What a classy response!
  2. Thank you Lt. Chris Perley of the Conway Police Department. He handled repeated attempts to prod him into sensationalism with the utmost professionalism. Bravo.

It’s hard to see your profession let you down. I don’t intend to return the favor.

CNN Time

So I’ve been asked to go on CNN to talk about this 20-year-old woman who has disappeared. Her baby was found in her car, but she has been missing since Saturday morning.

The show I’m going on is a crime program, Headline News Nancy Grace. It’s a little interesting to be on a show like this. Missing women is not the type of news I normally report on. But her family wants as much media attention as possible in hopes of finding this woman, so I figure I can go on and give as straight a story as possible. We’ll see how it goes…

Two More Gone

Late last year it was Joao Silva getting his legs blown off in Afghanistan, and now it’s Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, two photographers killed in Libya covering the civil war.

Hetherington’s death has received most of the press because he was the director of Restrepo, the award-nominated documentary about a year in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. I just posted my thoughts on the movie, and here it is days later he’s dead.

I went to Hondros’ website and clicked through to some of the links showing his images. It’s amazing to catch a glimpse into war so like and unlike what I saw.

People have to go where bad things happen, or else they happen in silence. It is terrifying what can happen to you as a reporter in these places, but not nearly as terrifying as what is happening there already.

I’m not a religious person, but I will take a moment of silence to remember these two men. They weren’t able to stop war by covering it, but they refused to let death go unnoticed. They deserve our thanks.

More Libya

This is a fantastic written account similar to the one I heard in person two weeks ago from David Rohde. It’s hard to figure out just what the right balance is. The story is not worth dying for, not worth putting others in danger or hurting your family for. But the story has to get out there, and it needs people like these to tell it. I’m not sure what that means in the end. Be careful, I guess, and find stories worth telling. Especially in war.

When Does The Reporter Matter?

I had a great discussion today about when it is appropriate for a reporter to share their perspective and when it isn’t, and what gets lost in the middle.

Have you seen Restrepo? I watched it before I went to Iraq. I knew what I would be going to do would be far different, but it was eye-opening and daunting to see just a month before my trip.

But ultimately it was disappointing. I didn’t think it told the story as powerfully as I expected. In a few weeks of covering war reporters send back stories about firefights and death. After a year with these soldiers I was expecting an opus. In that respect the film fell flat.

Now I haven’t read War, the book-version of the movie. Perhaps the written word caught what the video couldn’t.

I did, however, read The Forever War, an immensely powerful book that floored me page by page. It isn’t an opinion-free report from the front lines. It is full of emotion, and deadness inside, that tells a different story than the battlefield reports.

Is that what reporters are supposed to do? Are they supposed to give you the feel of the place, or just report the facts? What I came back from Iraq with was far more in depth than what made it into my radio reports. This blog, in fact, got more of a taste of what the real Iraq (that I saw, and as I understood it) was.

I guess that’s what I expect from the best reporting, but it isn’t something I yet feel comfortable doing. This American Life, for example, gets beyond what the story is into its meaning. The best reporting by The New York Times or The New Yorker does too. But that isn’t something reporters can take lightly. To get beyond the facts, so people can understand the story, is not easy. It isn’t everyday journalism. It’s far too easy to become partisan at that point, to tell the story from a liberal or conservative viewpoint that in fact does no one any good. But that’s what real journalism does — it takes the reader, viewer, listener to whatever the story is and really brings them it. It helps them to understand what it is they are learning, and what it really means.

I think about all the stories I read and saw and heard about Iraq before I went there, and about how little I understood when I landed. That was because too much of the journalism world is about the simple facts, instead of delving into the complex ones. Complexity doesn’t fit well into a half-hour news cast, but it is the way of the world. It is what reporters must tackle, and at the same time do it fairly.

It’s a documentarian perspective, brought to the mainstream. Don’t just tell people. Help them understand.

One More Vote

Last night was the town election for Conway, and today was the final day (hopefully) of reporting on an event that have ebbed and flowed for more than two months. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to cover something else.

I got a call today from what sounded like an older woman. “I hope you’re proud of yourself for what you put in the paper,” she said. “You probably got fired from your last job.” Then she hung up.

I’m not really sure which story that call was in reference to, but I have a couple ideas. I ran all the candidates’ names through the court system and came out with a couple who had criminal records. I called both men and gave them a chance to explain what happened. One didn’t seem to care, but the other freaked. “How can you do this?” he said. “Are you trying to hurt me?” I heard from some people around town that he was not happy with the story in the paper, and that he felt like I shouldn’t have written it.

Normally I wouldn’t have much sympathy for that — if you don’t want your record examined don’t run for public office. But this guy really was driven to get this position, even though he was not likely to win at all. It was one of those cases when I could feel for the guy, but I wasn’t about to do anything different.

I’ve become used to criticism as a reporter. I’ve written a number of stories people don’t like. When I used to work at the Reporter, everyone had my cell phone number. I’d get calls at home from angry politician unhappy with how I wrote about them. At least now those calls go to the office.

I can hear that criticism, and I don’t mind airing it in public. I would have encouraged the woman to write a letter to the editor blasting me for the story, had she only stayed on the phone long enough for me to respond.

But she didn’t. Elections do that. They fire people up and get them breathing hard. And then I stand in their way for a quote. I can’t expect not to gett spit on once in a while. I’m just happy it only comes once a year…

News, and paying for it.

The New York Times is charging. The world’s greatest newspaper (regardless of how The Chicago Tribune bills itself as) has gone behind a paywall. NYTimes.com has always been my go-to source for almost any story bigger than New Hampshire. It is the paper of record, as far as I am concerned. It’s homepage is bookmarked on every browser and every computer I use, and I’ve been going there for years.

And to think all that time I’ve been paying nothing.

I know, journalism is everywhere. We’ve come to think of it like water—it just comes out of the tap. For free. We seldom think of the infrastructure that makes it possible, of the value it contains.

Until someone starts bottling it.

My job and my future rest on the Times experiment working. Journalism jobs are hard to come by, and they aren’t paying quite what they used to. People can advertise online for less than they can in print, and many times the results are the same if not better. Papers (like mine in particular—a free daily) count on advertisers to fund reporting far more than the subscription price. As ad sales have dropped so has investment in journalism, which hurts readership, which further hampers ad sales.

And all I want to do is get out there and find out the facts…

The Times is trying to capture some of that online revenue that is otherwise evaporating. Who can blame them? They can’t give away something for nothing.

Several weeks ago New Hampshire Public Radio was holding their pledge drive, and I was reexamining my spending. I had subscribed to Netflix a few months before. I was paying $8 a month for access to streaming movies I generally didn’t care about. That’s $100 a year.

If access to crappy movies is worth $100 a year, what is excellent journalism worth?

I donated $150 to NHPR. I figure I’ll get some of it back in the end anyway…

The Times is charging between $15 and $35 a month for access to their website, depending on how you access it. That’s between $180 and $420 a year. Is The Times worth that? I would say it is, or at least that it’s worth $180 a year. I wouldn’t be interested in paying $420 a year, but I am living on a reporter’s pay.

The question, however, is whether everyone will pay, and whether the model can support Times-quality journalism in the future.

Don’t Print That!

I had a great conversation today with a guy running for police commission who didn’t want me to put in the paper that he’d been convicted of disorderly conduct and possession.

Those charges are from five years ago. “That’s in the past,” he said. True.

But the pending trespassing and resisting arrest charges aren’t from so long ago. Those are from January, and they won’t go to court until May 11, one day shy of a month after the election.

The man at first argued that this was his private criminal record, and I had no right to be putting it in the paper. I explained that I wasn’t looking to broadcast his record, but he had opted to run for public office. Every one of the candidates running for office went through the same level of scrutiny, I said, and we weren’t singling him out.

(Another man running for selectman and budget committee was arrested two and a half years ago for stealing scrap metal from the dump—a town entity. He was convicted of theft. Wouldn’t it be interesting to have someone convicted of stealing from the town elected to run it? I can’t make this stuff up.)

After explaining I wanted to give him a chance to explain his side of things he (the police commission candidate) did just that. He said he was set up (the selectman candidate said the same thing), and that he was the victim of police brutality, although he didn’t report it. I’m not sure about those accusations, but I can say he felt like I was tossing his hopes of winning the seat in the garbage. He called me back after we got off the phone the first time to tell me his attorney wanted me to know he might take a plea. I don’t want to be spreading this guy’s name all through the paper, but voters have a right to know who is running.

I’ve spent the last week and a half running through all the selectmen candidates, police commission candidates, library trustees, budget committee, etc. (I leave the school board to Lloyd.) They are all going to have their perspectives put in the paper. Almost no where do they get challenged before the election. We put in a few editor’s notes, like when a candidate says they would bring new ideas like LED streetlights (there are already LED streetlights), but we don’t have time to do full stories on all 30 candidates.

So here I’ve done a little digging, and I knock this guy totally off balance. I feel like telling him, “Look, but don’t run if you don’t want your criminal record discussed.”

The paper shouldn’t do that, he said, it’s private.

“Any middle school kid can go to the court house and request these records,” I said. “They are anything but private.”

I don’t think a criminal record should mean you can’t run for office, but I do think voters should be allowed to make informed decisions. On the other hand, some of the other candidate profiles should come with disclaimers themselves…

That’s politics, I guess.

A Little Too Close

I wrote my story about the man who fell down Mount Washington earlier this month. It was an interesting thing, to write about this man’s experience. Usually as a reporter I know less about whatever it is I’m reporting about than the person I’m speaking with, but not this time. This man was ice climbing on Mount Washington, a mountain I’ve put a lot of days in on. He was climbing Pinnacle Gully in Huntington Ravine, a route I first climbed 10 years ago. In my free time I guide clients up there, and sometimes I’ve been known to jog up there (or to other cliffs) to get a bit of climbing in before work. To tell his story, then, was surreal.

Not that I wanted to pass judgement. He made some decisions I would not have, but I have always been a conservative climber. It was more that he was describing for me, moment by moment, a fall very similar to one I’ve watched two other people take. One was a random climber who almost collided with me and my two clients, and the other was my ski partner. One broke both legs, the other broke both arms. It’s not a fall I want to see again.

But like the post before, about confronting the reality of reporting from dangerous places, this was a story that forced me to confront the reality of the dangers of my passion. Like the man I interviewed, I love to climb. To hear it from him, he is broken and yet he can’t wait to climb again. He is like I would be, I have to imagine, only I haven’t yet taken the fall.

It’s strange when a story forces you to look in the mirror. I was reporting for the Sun, telling a story for the readers, and yet the message seemed just for me. Funny how that happens.

Out of Africa

After six days in captivity, four New York Times reporters are out of Libya. Their account is here, and it makes me think one thing: don’t get caught.

This is a story that has ebbed and flowed alongside the overall news coverage of Libya. The earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster in Japan couldn’t have come at a better time for a strongman looking to reassert his power. It’s been interesting to see how these two stories have jockeyed for the limelight over the last week. But this part of the Libya story caught my eye. It’s hard to imagine a more frightening situation, one I’m working my way towards getting into. I’m just glad to see they’re out. Reporting has to happen in these conflicts, in order to squeeze a bit of humanity out of war. It’s sad when the referee gets hit.

Update: The newest story on the four New York Times reporters who were captured in Libya.