Quitting journalism

I just read a very interesting blog post on the site A Very Curious Mind (http://tinyurl.com/3427swz). It is by a magazine journalist, or I guess I should say a former magazine journalist, who was, at least in my opinion, at the top of her game. She was listed on the masthead of Inc. magazine and that says "success" to me.

The author, Allison Wellner, talks about going on an assignment where she was to observe a group of executives going through a multi-day wilderness leadership program through the National Outdoor Leadership School. Her assignment was to observe the execs and watch their conflicts, struggles and victories, then tell their story. And, she reports, she did so very successfully.

The experience, however, left her with an uneasy feeling about her own role in the event. Certainly she was a participant - she backpacked along with the execs - but her story, her experiences are pointedly left out. That brought home for her the adage that journalists are always selling out. She quotes directly from Janet Malcom's work The Journalist and the Murderer: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full himself to notice what’s going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

She is struggling with the identity, as she puts it, of being a bemused monarch observing her subjects.

I found this post particularly poignant because I have always struggled with this issue and I think it goes back to the class discussion from a couple weeks ago about journalistic ethics. It is why I have always avoided journalism classes and becoming a "reporter."

I've always felt that a reporter's mere presence in a situation effects it and changes it. That may not be the case for a simple report on a tragic car accident but it rings true in anything bigger than that. A reporter always brings his own biases, opinions, prejudices to a situation and sees the events (say of a court case) unfold through his own eyes.

When we interview someone about their most frightening experience, we experience their moment through our own fears. When we write about it, we choose the moments that speak to us most directly. We color their story through our own blurred vision. I think the only way to avoid this is the not "write" a story but to "transcribe" the exact events as they happen. It would be what a security camera records, with no edits or viewpoint changes. And that would be a tragic loss of great storytelling and would be painfully boring.

I think it is almost necessary for a journalist - or just a writer if that's what you want to call yourself (I do) - to put himself into a story. I think that we want to know more than just the 5W; we want to know what to feel, how to react, when to be angry, when to laugh. I don't think that this is a willingness to give up our own choice of reaction; I think that often, when faced with tragedy beyond our normal scope, we don't know how to react and a reporters interpretation of events helps us to know the appropriate response. It is a guide.

And I don't think that allowing a journalist to insert himself into a story is unethical. The only unethical thing would be if he intentionally misquotes someone or leaves out a fact in order to color a story. I think there is plenty of room for the facts, the reporter and the truth in any story.

But maybe that's the difference between magazine journalism and newspaper journalism.