Getting Booed off the Stage
Missourian reporter Kristee Sherry's blog
I have a very specific pet peeve:
It’s when a stand-up comedian tells a lame joke, and then blames the audience for not laughing:
“Come on! What’s wrong with you guys? That was funny!!!” (says comedian with desperate, outstretched arms).
Um, no it wasn’t. And it’s an audience’s prerogative not to laugh when a joke isn’t funny.
Sometimes the news media, unfortunately, work in the same way. Like the obliviously combative comedian, we spend so much time inside our own heads – strategizing our reporting, twiddling with sentences, dabbling among other journalists and media insiders and thinking about what looks good to us, that it’s easy to undervalue the perspectives of the people we’re serving. We forget that our readers (and prospective readers) might view our newspaper differently from outside the confines of a newsroom.
We talk about things like “immediacy,” the anecdotal lede, reflecting our community and putting a “local” spin on things – without knowing for sure if these goals and standards mesh with our readers’. And like the lame comedian, we run the risk of losing our audience if we don’t hear from media outsiders often enough.
When we were first introduced to the “Watching the Watchdog” assignment, I wasn’t enthused; in fact, I was somewhat bitter. I saw the project as yet another time-consuming obstacle to what I’d really hoped to be doing this summer, which was to become a more competent newspaper reporter/writer. [Studying and talking in circles about facets of journalism – as opposed to actually doing journalism – reminded me of the sort of self-involved navel-gazing I was forced to perform in a class called Qualitative Research Methods (no offense to Bob and Stephanie – they were cool).]
But part of this equation, I now realize, is keeping in check with our readers, and I was remiss to think that their feedback per se would be an obstacle to my becoming a better journalist. Once the first ‘Watchdog’ session kicked off, I saw the value in the discussion series. Hearing from actual Missourian readers with wonderfully diverse and legitimate opinions meant: 1. We have readers (!!!) and 2. We have readers (!!!) … and there are identifiable ways we could be serving them better. This was a twofold injection of encouragement and an invitation to step it up and write with this clearer vision of our audience in mind.
Likewise, I enjoyed completing the first vignette assignment this week. Once I found someone to interview (a fun, spunky teenager), the writing took care of itself as I did my best to relay her perspective of the media. I didn’t have to think too much about fancy writing or producing “good journalism” – because the vignettes aren’t about us; they’re about our readers.
Posted by Kristee Sherry