Watching Sausage Being Made
Jun 17th, 2005 at 5:38 pm by Susie
Teresa Neilsen Hayden explains where news comes from:
Once upon a time, I was the typesetter for a smallish weekly newspaper. I had keys to the place, and kept my own hours. The owners would leave me a stack of draft material. When they came back, the sheets of typeset repro would be hung up like the week’s laundry on a piece of string stretched across the office.
Here’s where their non-advertising content came from: The owners wrote the editorials and a small number of news stories themselves. Other bits of news came from the wire service. The syndicated features and columns arrived weekly in a single big manila envelope. And if all that plus the advertising wasn’t enough to fill the issue, which was usually the case, I’d start in on our stack of press releases.
The owners’ standing instructions were to go through, find the press releases that read most like news stories, and make any alterations necessary to improve that resemblance. I had a fairly good idea of how many column inches they’d need when it came time to make up the issue. All I had to do was give them that much plus a bit more, clean up everybody’s copy, and pick good press releases.
I hope most newspapers are a little less casual than that, but the underlying principle remains: reporting and newswriting takes work. Press releases are a freebie.
Lots of good stuff here on PR and how it’s used by lazy staffers to fill the news gap:
Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he’s writing about this subject at all.
Online, the answer tends to be a lot simpler. Most people who publish online write what they write for the simple reason that they want to. You can’t see the fingerprints of PR firms all over the articles, as you can in so many print publications– which is one of the reasons, though they may not consciously realize it, that readers trust bloggers more than Business Week.
I was talking recently to a friend who works for a big newspaper. He thought the print media were in serious trouble, and that they were still mostly in denial about it. “They think the decline is cyclic,” he said. “Actually it’s structural.”
In other words, the readers are leaving, and they’re not coming back.
Are you a journalist or a blogger? Or both? A journaler? A Blogourist?
Kos wants to know: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/6/17/173442/746
TERENCE SMITH: Who is a reporter, you mean?
VICTORIA TOENSING: I’m sorry. Who is a journalist, who qualifies to protect the source? The New York Times, sure, these are all Floyd’s kinds of clients, but what about a freelance journalist? What about a blogger?
TERENCE SMITH: Well, what about a blogger, Floyd Abrams?
FLOYD ABRAMS: I was asked that today, and I said as I say here, I think a blogger ought to be protected also. It seems to me that the purpose of this privilege is to protect the people who play a function in American life.
It’s not to protect reporters as such. It’s to protect people who gather information and disseminate it on a widespread basis to the public. So I think eventually if there is a privilege, and that’s one of the things the court’s going to deal with, but if there is a privilege here, whether it’s rooted in the First Amendment or what’s called federal common law, I think it should apply to bloggers as well.
I’ve done both news and pr– sometimes at the same time. I’ve also acted as a consultant to firms about what to look for in pr. I always tell whomever asks to write a brief (15 to 20 seconds for radio or tv) news story style release (instead of the longer flowery piece they always seem to want). I’ve had the distinctly uncomfortable pleasure of hearing my press releases read verbatim on the air in newscasts on multiple stations.
It never fails. Especially because most stations hire college grads for writing positions. If a press release is written well, they (these inexperienced college grads) won’t even try to rewrite- why go to the effort? And radio does so much rip and read of wire copy, what’s the difference (in their mind) for simply reading a well written press release?