Exit interviews for departing journalists
Ken Burns spoke at the Star Tribune in 2007, just before the premiere of his documentary, The War. Although he didn’t say it explicitly, a surprising detail became clear during his presentation: what motivated him most in the creation of The War wasn’t the film itself, but the footage. Every day, he said, another wave of World War II veterans was passing on, each person a library1 of insight on a drama that will reverberate long after all of us are gone, just after many of them had found their voice. When critics complained about the doc’s lengthy running time, they were missing the point. Burns’ edits, while careful, were an afterthought. The value had been in capturing the voices, not distilling them.
It might be maudlin, but I think about this as cities everywhere shed their longtime reporters. As I suggested early in the life of this blog, I think a news organization’s most valuable asset is the tremendous intellectual capital in its newsroom, the decades of knowledge about how the city works at a fundamental level. The past few years have seen a drastic depletion of this precious asset.
Thankfully, though, most of these reporters are still with us. And therein lies an opportunity.
Last fall, CJR ran a series of observations from departing journalists called “Parting Thoughts.” The essays were wistful, nostalgic, amusing, cathartic, sometimes angry, occasionally optimistic. It was a good idea, and I wonder if we could extend it.
I’d be tremendously curious to hear from these departing journalists a birds-eye-view of their beat. What were the most important developments they covered that even those readers who weren’t paying attention should be aware of? What from their beat should their community be keeping an eye on in the near future? What processes had they developed for covering the beat? Which stories had they always planned to do but never got around to? What advice would they give to anyone who wanted to pick up where they left off?
Unshackled from the need to be viewed as opinionless arbiters, ex-reporters might be able to give a more honest, probing, far-reaching assessment of their beats than they could while they were on the job. A collection of these interviews for every city would be a marvelous trove of knowledge, the beginnings of a stellar information asset. The interviews could be conducted by anyone — local bloggers, the reporter’s former colleagues, rival news orgs, Facebook friends.
Is this happening anywhere? If not, can someone try it?
If I get the time, I might just call up a few of my former colleagues myself.
- His word. [↩]
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+1
I did something like this when I left my first newspaper job after two years on the education beat, covering two very large districts and one very small, previously neglected district, along with overseeing coverage of several others. I wrote up a long series of notes to my successor, and I realized how much I knew about the districts and about education policy in California more generally. Most of it was in stories somewhere, but almost never in such direct, historical form. A lot of it helped the reporter who took over the beat, but I think readers would have benefited a lot from it, too.
We (as a profession) need better ways of getting institutional knowledge out more often.
Chris_Amico
28 Jan 09 at 8:14 am