Journalism lessons from an enemy of the people

In which all my knowledge of the news media is revealed. I mean, disclosed.

The news business used to be a lot simpler. When I was a reporter, I knew how to do my job, I knew what my role was, and the people I wrote about understood it, too. They might not like that I was hanging around, asking questions and scribbling in a notepad, but they didn’t see me as an “enemy of the people,” as a certain orange buffoon put it.

The five newspapers I worked at didn’t engage in schemes or conspiracies in their news coverage. We wouldn’t have had time, for one thing. More crucially, no news outfit I worked for was organized enough to do any social and political string pulling. Newspaper staffs often joked that their publications ought to be named “The Daily Miracle,” because of the slapdash nature of the work.

It was challenging and sometimes frenetic, but it wasn’t sinister and it just wasn’t that complicated.

One of my early newspaper editors said, “Our job is to report the news.” And if you didn’t know what news was, or how to report it, well, he didn’t have much use for you.

It was simple: Report what happened, get it right and get the most important elements up high in the story.

“A driver was killed and six students injured Tuesday night when a van carrying a high school debate team spun out of control during an ice storm and crashed into a utility pole, knocking out power along several blocks of North Main Street.”

The basic Who, What, When and Where huddled together, with the probable Why and How edging in close.

Report the basics first, then figure out what other issues, questions or followup stories might be tagging along with the news. With most of the news we reported, there wasn’t much of a second-day angle to bother with. Sometimes a crash is just a crash, as Freud said.

But other times, you’d find a nugget in the wreckage of tragedy or in the thicket of institutional process.

Maybe the city editor walks over, scratching her head, holding a slip of paper with a phone number. Says a mom of one of the kids in the van called in. Said the debate team advisor, who was driving, had posed it as an issue for the team to argue on the way. Resolved: That the icy street is too dangerous and we should turn around and go back to the school.

Two of the kids are still in the hospital, the city editor says, and the high school is organizing a memorial service for the teacher. She’d been there forever, apparently. Supposedly the governor was a student of hers.

See what you can find out.

That was how it worked. In my career, I most enjoyed finding the deeper stories that spun off the news. They were always my favorite stories to pursue.

Looks like a watercolor painting, doesn’t it? That’s looking north to downtown Portland from across Oaks Bottom, a wildlife refuge along the Willamette River. A journalist might wonder — should wonder — who or what is out there in that fog.

Times being what they are, as they say, I feel compelled to explain journalism as I know it. Or knew it, I guess.

It’s clear, given what passes for public discourse on social media, that a lot of people don’t know how the media world works.

Actually, I don’t know either, not these days. I’m retired, and any insights I have are drawn from my Oregon newspaper days. That was about 37 million years ago, so their current application is sketchy. Things change.

Nonetheless, I’ve assembled what I call the Rules of Journalism. I’ve told journalism professors, friends of mine, that students should be required to memorize them.

A couple more grafs of explanation: I find myself telling people that journalism was probably the only professional job I was suited for. It was immense fun. It required me to learn something almost every day, and to learn it well enough to summarize it accurately to a lay audience. Reporting the news, I tell people, was almost always interesting, hardly ever boring and sometimes downright exciting. I loved it; probably too much sometimes.

Here are links to some of those Rules of Journalism and to stories that illustrate them:

First rule — There’s always something else. This story from early in my reporting days is the best example I have at hand. It pays to be curious, even when you’re doing a routine budget story.

Second rule — Go see it in person. You’re a reporter, aren’t you? Yes, the pressure to post quickly and the lack of access often mean you have to report by phone and text, or depend on the sodden, misleading gibberish of news releases and canned statements. But when you can, Go See. This visit to a police crime lab still cracks me up.

Fifth rule — Mistakes are part of the game. You will make some, and they will sting. Hopefully, they only hurt you, not the people you write about. I can laugh about them now, but these goofs from long ago still make me grimace, too.

Ninth Rule — When you’re covering the news, being brash, pushy or even sneaky sometimes gets you what courteous persistence doesn’t. But there’s a limit, isn’t there? As one of my favorite literary figures says, “There’s some kinds of a son-of-a-bitch you don’t have to be, even to be a newspaperman.” This encounter with a school shooter’s sister is an example, although it probably cost me a scoop.

18th rule — It was a high-profile murder trial, the first under the state’s new death penalty law, and I was dead serious about covering it correctly. But it turned into a grim charade, and the other players in the justice system shrugged. Sometimes, journalists are the only ones who tend the flame.

18th rule, addendum — The wheels of justice turn slowly, and all that. But they do turn.

The Complete, Annotated Rules of Journalism -- Here are all the rules in one place.

Oh, wait, here's a few more Rules — Another addendum, I guess.

The Sheepman — I discovered the story of Oregon sheepman Henry Krebs when I was researching the military history of my mom’s father, Charles Miller. He and Mr. Krebs served in the same battalion in France during World War I. I include this story among the journalism rules because it’s a good example of the delightful rabbit holes you might come across. Jump on down.

Go get ‘em.