Newspaper reporting

Recently a friend and I had a discussion about newspaper reporting and certain reporters having a "voice."

In theory, I believe, one should be able to read a newspaper and not be able to tell which reporter wrote what because there are rules about what information should go where & etc. I don't know them all because I did not go to journalism school.

Well, truth be known, I know some of them because I was taught to write a news story by someone who did go to journalism school. But he was more interested in pleasing his readers than in some rules laid down by - who? or whom?

My mother gave me a book for Christmas called "The Elements of Journalism." In the "praise for" section, it says the tenets outlined in the book are now being taught in journalism schools across the country.

One of the main thrusts of the book is the mistaken (according to the author) belief that newspaper stories should be short and only use little words. For instance, I was told by the editor at a certain newspaper to write at a fifth grade level.

I thought this was insulting to the readers and said so.

But I find that some younger people agree with this philosophy. And here, I have learned, was the insurmountable mountain that came between me and the editor of this newspaper.

I was relaying the information to someone else I know that the editor would not publish the fact that Stephen Karp was coming to town until there was a firm date. "Sometime in March" wasn't good enough. This person I was talking to (another young person) agreed that it wasn't good enough and asked me to imagine the letters the papers would have received complaining about the vagueness of the story.

I was thinking, imagine the embarrassment of this paper not having a story at all about this major event, until it was old news.

I thought, and still do, that the fact that he was coming to town at all was a big story. Luckily for me, in this instance, I was able to get the date and write the story (for the online edition of the paper) in a somewhat timely manner, given that the daily had the "vague" story on the front page, above the fold, within the same week.

Another instance was when I was told that nothing that happened in a municipal meeting was news unless it had been voted on. Under that restriction, a fistfight could have broken out between 2 city councillors and it wouldn't have been news, I guess.

I believe nearly everything that happened at a municipal meeting is news. I could, and did, get at least 2 stories out of each City Council or School Committee meeting. And the School Committee could

go for weeks without voting on anything.

I really have never felt a generation gap as large as the one between people my age (baby boomers) and the people who are young enough to be our kids.

So back to reporters having a "voice." I attended an event at the high school on Tuesday, where I saw for the first time a lot of people I knew through working for the Current. Many of them said they missed my voice; or what they actually said meant that.

I should have told them to read the Port Planet, to which I am now a contributor (they invited me; I was honored to accept).

I have no clue how this gap is to be bridged. With newspapers hiring more and more young people and releasing their older reporters out into the world of unemployment, the voices of individual reporters are growing more and more distant.

It has become all rote and cookie-cutter. Nowhere is this more clear than in the reporting being done on the landfill issue. There is more information being disseminated on the local blogs (all of them) than in the local newspapers.