Reporting Suffers With Smoothing Of Rough Edges
By KATHLEEN PARKER
Newspaper readers often lament the declining quality of journalism and wonder, what happened? Two words. Human resources.
Thanks in part to human resources personnel those well-meaning, misguided individuals who view writers and editors as cogs in a well-oiled machine newsrooms have lost their souls.
Reporters good ones are wild, untamable spirits who, in the core of their crusty little hearts, really do love and want to pursue Truth, Liberty and Justice for all. Or something like that, and so it was once upon a time. Those who try to tame them are as Anne Rice’s body thieves or the body snatchers of movie fame. They evict the irascible artist and install a complaisant tenant unrecognizable just a couple of decades ago.
I was reminded of these changes recently while browsing Jim Romenesko’s media gossip Web site. Like most in the media, I visit this site once or twice a month, mostly hoping not to find my name there.
The current debate among industry folks concerns a column by Jill Geisler, a “leadership and management group leader,” for the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists.
Her column in part addressed the use of profanity in newsrooms. Geisler said more or less that profanity in newsrooms is inappropriate, unnecessary and can contribute to a hostile environment.
On the surface, it’s hard to make a case for profanity. There’s too much of it in our culture; it’s coarse and demeaning; it suggests intellectual laziness and blahblahblah.
Thus, it wasn’t so much Geisler’s comments that caused my carotid artery to swell as it was the spirit behind her column, or should I say, the lack thereof.
As monopolies have gobbled up daily papers, eliminating competition and streamlining “product,” they’ve installed bean counters and human resource managers where hungover city editors used to do just fine. We’ve traded passion for “good feelings,” and individuality for multicultural groupthink. Where we used to kick a** and take names, we have become precious.
I hate to sound like an old-timer, but after 25 years pecking at keyboards, I’m beginning to feel like one. My first newsroom was a smoky cocoon of noisy typewriter clatter, puddles of spilled coffee, desks piled with yellowing newspapers, books and over-filled ashtrays, flirting run amok, gruff old men who kept liquor bottles in the bottom desk drawer and curmudgeonly characters right out of central casting. And yes, we cussed.
There’s little fun about today’s newsrooms. My next newsroom just five years later was an electronic morgue for obsessive compulsives. Editors looked cookie-cut from a Wharton MBA mold, sporting carefully clipped beards and bow ties. No one smoked. Coffee cups had been displaced by Evian bottles. Flirting, now officially illegal, was via instant messages, surreptitious and far more dangerous.
Not all things old are better, but newsrooms were. And journalism practiced in a less constrained environment may have been, too. Some things can’t be micromanaged, and the human spirit, that intangible force that keeps underpaid, overworked writers from going AWOL, is one. Dammit.
Kathleen Parker is a columnist with the Orlando Sentinel.
