Scary thought about the next crop of young journalists...

There was once a kid in a journalism class at my school that tried to pass himself off as a reporter from the student paper. That didn't fly, especially when he tried to get credentials by saying he was with the student paper. That made for one confused SID and one angry sports editor.

I never made up quotes for my stories per say, but I did use friends and strongly suggest certain things to say. If only I could do the same now...

 

wow - i wish i'd never read this thread.

 

so we can safely say none of these kids will become f'in studs?

 

Guess I'm stone-age school since it's been 25 years since I had to class assignments, but never ever did a dishonest story or interview or make up quotes for a j class. Was always up front and said this is for a class assignment...and people were willing to do it. Never a problem. If I didn't get it done, didn't get it done, oh, well, took my nice 2.5 GPA to the major metro daily in town and started writing for them right away. I think that honesty served me well.

You start out in school trying to fake your way to the top, you end up faking a lot of other crap in life as well. Apologies to James Thunder Early for stealing the line.

 

Well, having read Stephen Glass, the guy was a hell of a writer... He was a complete fraud, but a hell of a writer...

I got mad at other students in college who interviewed their friends for stories, but there's a big difference between lazy reporting and a complete fabrication...

 

Normally I'm all about defending the young'uns, but I've seen this stuff happen way too often in my undergrad and grad J-school.

One of my grad school classmates used to fudge her quotes, often using her friends from back home. Upon graduation she got a job at Newsweek, and one of her duties was to research and answer the reader-based question in the Tip Sheet section. Both the reader's and writer's names are given, and about three months into her job the "readers" suddenly became our former classmates, her roommate, her sister, etc.

 

Coaches like to say you play the way you practice, and in this context I tend to think it's true. The point of a class exercise is not to get through it; it's to do it. To take the easy way out is to postpone dealing with real people. I'm not judging, but I wouldn't want my students making up quotes or using friends as sources.

 

I don't see it as a slippery slope, because I knew what I was doing wasn't right. That makes me sound kind of bad as a person I guess, but as I journalist I understand how wrong that is and would never do it for a newspaper. It's just then when I was already putting in a full schedule at the student paper and having to study for tests and write papers it seemed to be a waste of time to "write a profile about someone on campus." Umm, I was already doing that... about the athletes on the teams I covered.

 

I don't find this any scarier than the fact that both Blair and Glass were from the same generation ... mine.

 

Unfortunately, you're only as good as your leaders in this country, and this industry.

Nothing surprises me anymore, except for the value of leaders who embrace honesty and integrity above everything else.

Youngsters, write that down. Oldsters, push harder for what is right, please.

 

One thing that I did get out of it is that I never, ever blow off a student looking for quotes and interviews. And I still get a lot of that because, for some reason, they still think a woman working in sports is a novelty worthy of a story.

Same freakin' questions every time.

But on the flip side, having seen myself quoted both with them and in actual media (because "real" reporters are often too lazy to get to the real source and interview other reporters), I'm much more sensitive about context when I'm quoting people.

And I have a better understanding of why they sometimes get pissed about something that they said, as it appears in print. When it's written in black and white, and not in its entirety, it definitely can look completely different than when someone says it in the first place.

The difference is that I'll understand that, while an athlete or coach cannot be expected to.

 

I work with an intern now who can't put a noun and a verb together in the same two word sentence and doesn't have a clue on punkchiation.... I weep