Malcolm Gladwell's advice to aspiring journalists

As a person or a writer?

 

I don't know him as a person, so I'm not comfortable commenting on his personality. I do think many of his conclusions (If A + B = C, then C must be gospel!) are spacious and arbitrary.

 

OK. I guess when I said "as a person," I meant more like, are you commenting on the work or the guy who gives interviews and such. But you meant the work.

I think there are a lot of people in your camp. The full-court press basketball story was one I recall a lot of sports writers rolling their eyes about.

Obviously Gladwell and Michael Lewis work their stories out of some of the same cloth, but for some reason I find Lewis's work a little more rigorous and a little less ... sleight of hand?

 

Lewis' work and his conclusions are always formed first by the reporting. Gladwell purposefully (in my opinion) goes about it backward. He's an essayist, and he's searching for reporting to support his theories, and leaving out anything that doesn't support those arguments. But what makes Gladwell insufferable (in many instances) is that he believes his conclusions and findings (in many instances) are as credible as what people like Lewis do, when in fact they are not.

I enjoy a lot of Gladwell's writing. It's interesting. But he's a lot closer to Chuck Klosterman that he is Michael Lewis. Klosterman throws out ideas because he wants to make you think about stuff differently, but he's more honest about it in my opinion because he always concedes "This might be total bullshit." I think Gladwell really believes a middle school girls basketball team's full court press and the surprise war tactics of a rag-tag band of bedouin fighters mean that the only reason Rick Pitino didn't succeed with the Celtics is he wasn't committed enough to the press. Which is insane.

 

As a practical matter, the opportunities for someone with a master's degree are unlikely to pay off the cost of the degree. Let's say the New York Times had a writer who had gotten a master's degree in environmental engineering, or oceanography, or whatever would be deemed the most scientifically relevant degree to examine the BP oil spill and the Japan nuclear meltdown. I'm sure the reports that followed would be very detailed and informative. But the New York Times' current reporting is very detailed and informative relative to what most people already know about the matter.

Also, academic writing is very different from mass-media writing, and that isn't an easy transition to make for someone who is used to the graduate-school style of fully explaining every single data point in a 3,000-word paper. I spend a lot of time in a couple of freelance jobs removing the experts' high-level jargon. You could say I'm "dumbing it down," but the idea in the publications I'm working for is to appeal to industry types. They aren't dumb. Yet even they don't need to know the matter in the detail they're receiving from academic types.

 

It's not a journalist's job to be an expert in a field, per se.

It's a journalist's job to translate the experts in the field into plain English. And also into words like somambulent.

 

That job is becoming increasingly antiquated.

 

Atul Gawande also has journalism experience, to go along with his medical degrees. He was the editor of the Stanford Daily when I was there, and he was amazing, as you might imagine. But Stanford had no undergrad journalism degree back then, and I believe he was strictly pre-med on the academic side.

 

How many "specialists" have been laid off or exited through buyouts due to management deeming them luxuries and claiming they need more "general" reporters who can move about on the fly?

Having deep knowledge about a specific area can be a great benefit, as are managers who realize that.