I don’t know if I’ll really be able to add to this conversation, but two cents anyway:
I became a journalist more than 10 years ago because of a similar sentiment - I thought “mainstream media” was pretty terrible, and yet influential in society, and I wanted to know how it could be better.
I was a reporter for several years, an editor for a few, and now I teach journalism.
1. News angles are the fundamental part of news writing - probably the source of most of these problems, of overselling (or “beating up”) a story. It’s basically an effort to get straight to the point, a point as sharp as the facts will allow. You’ll go to the same press conference as a room full of journalists, and you’d better come out with the strongest piece of news. When you’re new, you’ll miss the most interesting or important piece of information, or you’ll bury it halfway down your story, and your competitor will make you look like you can’t do your job. Sooner or later you’re all thinking the same way and picking the same angles.
(This process seems to happen quite organically - the problems of social media look similar. But I’ll stick to personal experience, since that’s probably all I have to add.)
2. My least favorite aspect of the stereotypical personality of a journalist is a sense of self-importance. You start to believe you’re important because you talk to important people and write about important things. And some of it is a defense mechanism and hard to live without. Frequently, you need to challenge people - ask hard questions of the government, say. And that’s one of the most important things you can do as a journalist. A bit of bravado as armor really helps, because you will get attacked all the time. This feeling of “it’s us against the world” just crops when you’re doing accountability journalism. You need to be willing to piss anyone off, especially because everyone will be trying to manipulate you and spin their story, even in an innocent way, and you’ve got to try to stay independent. And when you get it wrong, you’re just acting like a sociopath.
3. A big part of journalism is “for the record.” You call people up and write it down - it doesn’t need to be this great investigation - and then other people can form opinions and bigger analyses out of it. There’s a lot this, and it’s pretty helpful.
That’s long enough, and I won’t add any conclusions, just leave an impression of what you deal with when you’re in it.
I became a journalist more than 10 years ago because of a similar sentiment - I thought “mainstream media” was pretty terrible, and yet influential in society, and I wanted to know how it could be better.
I was a reporter for several years, an editor for a few, and now I teach journalism.
1. News angles are the fundamental part of news writing - probably the source of most of these problems, of overselling (or “beating up”) a story. It’s basically an effort to get straight to the point, a point as sharp as the facts will allow. You’ll go to the same press conference as a room full of journalists, and you’d better come out with the strongest piece of news. When you’re new, you’ll miss the most interesting or important piece of information, or you’ll bury it halfway down your story, and your competitor will make you look like you can’t do your job. Sooner or later you’re all thinking the same way and picking the same angles.
(This process seems to happen quite organically - the problems of social media look similar. But I’ll stick to personal experience, since that’s probably all I have to add.)
2. My least favorite aspect of the stereotypical personality of a journalist is a sense of self-importance. You start to believe you’re important because you talk to important people and write about important things. And some of it is a defense mechanism and hard to live without. Frequently, you need to challenge people - ask hard questions of the government, say. And that’s one of the most important things you can do as a journalist. A bit of bravado as armor really helps, because you will get attacked all the time. This feeling of “it’s us against the world” just crops when you’re doing accountability journalism. You need to be willing to piss anyone off, especially because everyone will be trying to manipulate you and spin their story, even in an innocent way, and you’ve got to try to stay independent. And when you get it wrong, you’re just acting like a sociopath.
3. A big part of journalism is “for the record.” You call people up and write it down - it doesn’t need to be this great investigation - and then other people can form opinions and bigger analyses out of it. There’s a lot this, and it’s pretty helpful.
That’s long enough, and I won’t add any conclusions, just leave an impression of what you deal with when you’re in it.