Teaching Journalists: A 25-Year Odyssey

I'm a month away from 25 years as a teacher of journalists. My dean, Karen Brown Dunlap, asked me to mark this occasion by describing what I've learned. The first thing I learned: When working with journalists, always hand them a list. So here is what has worked for me.

1. Ask questions for which you do not know the answers. Gene Patterson hired me, in part, because of my ignorance of conventional wisdom and the ways of journalists. My lifeline was the good question. It turned my students into my teachers.
   
   
2. Always link craft to the higher purposes of journalism and democracy. In my professional work, I keep my eyes on the prize. Nothing matters if it doesn't improve journalism. Diversity, ethics, and skills training are all important because they improve journalism. And journalism is not important for its own sake, only as a path toward freedom, justice, and tolerance, community.
   
   
3. Demystify the steps toward excellent work. Many journalists think the best work is magic. "I could never report and write something like 'Blackhawk Down,' even with all the time in the world," they say. Marathons are run a mile at a time, and journalists grow from understanding the best work as a rational process, a path of steps.
   
   
4. Put names on things. Oliver Sachs, the author/neurologist, wrote about the first time he met a "Tourette's Syndrome" patient. After the meeting he began to see several other cases on the streets of New York City. What a coincidence, he thought. Then he realized that Tourette's patients had been there all along, but that without a name for their disorder, they had been invisible to him. Similarly, labels give writers access to their techniques: foreshadowing, cliffhangers, frames, circle structures, nut graphs.
   
   
5. Make and share tools. Tool-making and work-benching are the dominant metaphors at Poynter. While I like to challenge journalists with ideas and theories beyond their normal reach, these are mere curiosities until they are carved into tools.
   
   
6. Work across discipline. We begin, of course, within the disciplines of the journalism guild: writing, editing, design, photjournalism, illustration, graphics, ethics, reporting. These specialized journalists must learn from each other and associate their visions and talents for the greater good. Beyond that, journalists learn well from other disciplines, from music, forensic science, abnormal psychology.
   
   
7. Challenge the conventional wisdom. I'm not espousing iconoclasm for its own sake. I'm embracing tough questions about the status quo, never accepting the answer "because we've always done it that way." Why don't we run any black and white photos on the front page? Why can't we run an occasional editorial on page one? Why can't our copy editors provide more news tips? What would happen if we wrote this story only in words of one syllable?
   
   
8. Work with the willing on what they do best. Here I embrace the book First, Break All the Rules. Don't try to train journalists beyond their talent and capacity. Work first and most often with those who want to grow, help them understand their talent, build on that, and match that talent to the mission of the institution.
   
   
9. Talk, talk, talk. I measure the learning culture of a newsroom by the quality of the talk. Are people talking about how the best work is accomplished? Or is talk limited to complaints and punishments? As a teacher, it's my job to improve the quality of talk in the newsroom.
   
   
10. Point the trajectory of training beyond the horizon. Whatever my training assignment ("Roy, teach them to writer shorter stories with greater impact"), I always teach beyond the immediate task, to the place where the writer doesn't even know he or she wants to go, perhaps to the next job at another newspaper. I'm not just teaching the student to make paper airplanes. I'm helping her imagine herself as an origami artist or an engineer for Boeing.
    
    
11. Train editors to train. When I began teaching writing to children, I noticed that some of the teachers would pay close attention and other teachers would work on chores or even leave the room. I don't want editors, especially middle managers to leave the room. My goal is not to replace them, or compensate for them, but to give them the tools they need to train on the line, every day.
    
    
12. Find and put to work the best talent in the newsroom. I learned this the week I was asked to coach Howell Raines on his writing, way back in 1977. Howell was political editor of the St. Petersburg Times and that month had two books published, a novel and an oral history of the civil rights movement. What was I going to tell him: "Howell, use more active verbs in your next novel"? Instead, I interviewed him on how he reported and wrote his best work, then transcribed the interview and passed it out to the staff.
    
    
13. Never shill for the secret agendas of management. Say a manager comes to me with this request: "Roy, you know how the economy is. We've cut news hole and staff. So I've got to get my reporters to be more productive. They have to write more stories in less time. And they can't spend a lot of time in the field. They have to use the telephone more creatively. Can you teach us how to do that?" I could, but I won't. Training, to have any credibility, can never be used to enable an addiction to weak leadership or bad management.
    
    
14. Take responsibility for the education of all journalists, not just the ones in your shop. News organizations don't exactly lead the league in training. Trainers must accept responsibility for the advancement of the whole profession, being generous with our knowledge and resources, fighting against proprietary restrictions. In the long run, we'll learn more, and teach more effectively.
    
    
15. Bad journalism is less a failure of craft and resources than a failure of purpose and imagination.

Copyright 2002 The Poynter Institute. This article was posted with the kind permission of Dr. Roy Peter Clark.