New recruits

On Monday I started teaching a five-week version of Introduction to Journalism and Mass Media at Metro State College of Denver. It was a weird week to start teaching a summer class with the Fourth of July falling in the middle of it, but it was good to be back in the classroom again.

I have 15 students -- some of them wanting to go into journalism, others just taking the class as an elective. The five-week summer version of the course is my favorite to teach. The class moves quickly, which keeps both me and the students more interested in the material. (By week 9 or 10 of a regular semester class, it's tempting to just check out and wish the end of the semester would come quickly.) I feel like I get to know the students better as well, since I see them four days a week for two hours a day. Summer students tend to be a bit more motivated as well. I figure if you're going to school over the summer, you either have to or you want to.

I've taught this class so many times, it's hard sometimes for me to see it from a fresh perspective. Those new eyes always seem to come with what we did in class today. I always show the movie "All the President's Men," the story of how two Washington Post reporters broke the Watergate story in 1972, at this point in the course. It serves as a good introduction to the topic of newspapers and their role in American society. The movie, based on the nonfiction book by the same name, also never fails to put a little inspiration back into my journalistic heart as well. The film (made in 1976) stars two very young but now famous actors, Robert Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein. I always manage to get something out of watching these two portray Woodward and Bernstein, America's first real celebrity journalists (although they didn't set out to become celebrities). I've seen the film probably 10 times, but I never get tired of it.

What struck me today was watching Woodward (Redford) insist on having real, definitive facts before he ran with a story, while Bernstein (Hoffman) was more comfortable inferring things, assuming things, filling in the blanks. I tend to be more like Woodward. In my career I've lived through the consequences of making assumptions, even in small things that don't really seem to matter. As a journalist you can't even assume you know how to spell someone's name, no matter how simple it is, like Joe Smith or Jane Johnson. You have to ask questions -- and keep asking them -- even if you think you understand something. I've gotten over the fear of sounding stupid by asking "dumb" questions. I'd rather sound stupid in an interview than look stupid when a story is published and is wrong.

These are the little nuances of being in journalism that are fun to see with new eyes and try to pass on to the "new recruits" in my classes. It's even more fun in the other class I teach, Beginning Reporting (which I won't teach until the fall), where students learn the basics of writing news stories. I know I drive my students crazy, nitpicking on "minor" things like spelling people's names correctly. They get zeros on their assignments for spelling names wrong -- even getting one little letter in a person's name wrong. I tell them that learning to pay attention to details begins now in the classroom, not when they get their first job. They balk when they get their first zero -- and most of my students get at least one zero through the course of a semester -- but they learn quickly to double check and triple check what they're doing. And when the occasional student begs me to give them a break -- after all, they thought they double-checked everything -- I remind them that I'm training them for the real world, where not only editors/producers, but readers/viewers/listeners expect journalists to be professionals. It's serious business, and now is the time to take it seriously.

I also tell them that in a bigger sense, integrity begins with the little things. And how you handle the little things reflects how you'll handle the big things. Some people don't grasp that Woodward and Bernstein didn't have the story of their careers handed to them. Their editor never called them into his office and said, "Hey, guys, write this huge investigative piece on Watergate, will you? We've figured out all the details; we just need some hotshot writers like you to write it for us."

No, they pieced it together little by little, one development at a time. Those developments were uncovered for two years before President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974. And Woodward was there, insisting that the stories be based on facts, not assumptions. Call me an idealist, but that's the kind of journalist I want these "new recruits" to be.