A Brief History…

By Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R.

This is a companion and followup to the previous piece about newspapers and local government.

That piece discussed what happens when newspapers lose track of their ties to the local community. As editors are wont to say, here is the “nut graf”, journalese for the point of the story about a reporter for the Orange County Register and its affiliate local paper, the Saddleback Valley News:

We finally get a local reporter who cares about these local issues and reports the facts. So what happens? The overstaffed and lazy city government calls her in for a “talk” and the reporting stops. This is why newspapers are dying, although on a very small scale. Still, this is where that reporter was learning her career and this is what she learned. What a shame.

The moral of this story is not difficult to understand. A group of concerned citizens, the kind a newspaper should be happy to have, are disillusioned by the newspaper’s neglect of their concerns. So newspapers should concentrate on serving those local citizens and not let things get between them and their readers.

Now take a gander at what the OC Register is looking for in a county government reporter. It’s totally unrealistic, hence this post’s headline.

(Note:  I have no personal animus against the paper; and I generally approve of its Libertarian opinion-page leanings. It’s not a competitor to my employer. I chose the Register because it’s familiar to me and senior blogger Mike K., who lives in Mission Viejo. And its problems are widespread in the newspaper business.)

Here’s the full text of the Register’s job announcement:

Newsroom Associates:

We are looking for a new county government reporter. The job entails embedding yourself in the county Hall of Administration to develop sources that will enable you to obtain confidential documents and break stories about important county developments before they become public in a press release or meeting. The reporter will be expected to post regularly on both the Total Buzz and OC Watchdog blogs, to write dailies as necessary about important county developments, to write longer analyses and feature profiles, to write Watchdog-style enterprise stories about waste and abuse, and to find or contribute to major investigations. This reporter also collaborates with the politics team on election and issues coverage.

In addition, we expect this reporter to find new ways to make county government coverage more interactive, including such strategies as live Twitter and/or blog updates, reader polls, and multimedia presentations.

The successful candidate will:
–be a self-starter who appreciates expert guidance but rarely needs it
–have demonstrated the ability to cover a complex beat in a sophisticated way.
–have demonstrated the ability to develop a balanced coterie of sources
–be an excellent writer with a wide range of skills; able to translate bureaucratic lingo into clear, concise and reader-friendly stories
–have demonstrated the ability to perform on and meet deadlines
–have experience writing fair and complete Watchdog-style stories
–be familiar with CCI, Word Press and CAT and have a demonstrated ability to use them without problems
–be comfortable working with radio and TV broadcasters, both our partners and independent media who want to showcase our expertise on county issues.

In addition to the above these skills will help an applicant rise to the top:
–Investigative reporting experience
–Computer-assisted reporting skills
–Spanish and/or Vietnamese language skills

If you are interested in applying please send an e-mail to Chris Knap, editor for government, politics and investigations, along with a brief bio and links to three recent stories that you feel show your best skills. You will be contacted for an interview. We hope to fill the job by the end of July.

Got all that?

The OC Register doesn’t want a reporter; it wants a minor deity.

Much of the job description looks like a bunch of trendy ideas: “live Twitter and/or blog updates, reader polls, and multimedia presentations . . .”

Gack.

Blogs can be useful, but they shouldn’t be done just for the sake of blogging. And the online polls, especially the kind newspapers like to offer, are mostly bogus. Newspapers aren’t going to put the kind of work and expense into an online poll to make it scientific. To be blunt about it, such polls, and the infamous related Person On the Street interviews, are frauds. You can read about that particular deception in an article by a disgruntled fired employee. Is he right? Read the article and decide for yourself.

As for doing multimedia projects, that’s a nice skill to have. But very few people are proficient in such presentations and also have good investigative reporting talents. Better to have specialists for each of these tasks: It’s called division of labor, and it’s efficient.

And as for interactivity, nothing beats a reporter wearing out shoe leather in the community, learning its concerns and serving its needs. If the paper lacks a commitment to that basic principle, then no amount of high-tech drag is going to cover it up. It’s fashionable for journalists to underestimate the intelligence of the public, but that contempt eventually hurts the journalists. The public will go elsewhere for its news.

To sum up, anyone with the set of skills the Register desires is going to make a lot more money elsewhere, probably outside of journalism. So in addition to having superhuman abilities, the Register’s ideal candidate apparently will also have a Buddha-like indifference to material things.

Unsolicited advice to the Register: Such a person doesn’t exist. Be reasonable about your expectations and view job applicants more from the viewpoint of your readers and potential readers, and less from some internally produced checklist.

As with everything I write here, the views expressed here are my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, the North County Times.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 9:15 pm and is filed under media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.