An old friend just put me in touch with a young man who is starting a journalism career. My advice to him is pretty commonplace: Start local. Approach the local newspaper editor about covering municipal and school board meetings on a freelance basis; most editors need this sort of thing done and don’t have enough people to do it.
But there’s one piece of advice that I’m putting here instead of just telling him because it applies to so many people, not just this young man: Don’t be afraid to ask questions that revel your ignorance. There’s an old saying often attributed to Will Rogers: We are all ignorant, just on different subjects.
An example from a painful mistake I made in the 1990s: I was covering the school board for the Ely Daily Times in rural Nevada. One board member was absent. There was a motion on some contentious local issue; I no longer remember what the issue was, but it was the biggest local story. The board members present had a tied vote.
Ideally, the board president or the superintendent would have explained what happens with a tied vote so everyone attending the meeting knew. Since that didn’t happen, I should have approached them and asked what happens when they have a tied vote. But I didn’t do that. Under the parliamentary procedure that I was familiar with, a tied vote means the motion doesn’t have majority support, so the motion fails.
I wrote an article for the next day’s paper saying that the motion had failed on such-and-such issue. After the story was published, someone from the school district phoned the editor and explained that a tied vote there means that the issue will be voted on again at the next meeting a month later. We were under orders from the company’s headquarters to put corrections in the same place for every issue, so the correction appeared on an inside page (which was page 2 if I remember correctly). Of course, a lot more people saw that big headline on page 1 saying the motion had failed than saw that correction on an inside page.
The next month, the issue came up again. People in the audience (and those meetings were packed) were murmuring about the issue being settled a month ago. I stood up and said something like, “Excuse me. I’m Dan Robrish, the reporter from the Daily Times. I made a mistake last month. I thought a tied vote meant the motion failed since it didn’t get a majority. It turns out that they way they do things here, a tied vote is brought up for reconsideration at the next meeting. We printed a correction, but apparently a lot of people didn’t see the correction. I’m sorry about my mistake and any confusion I caused.”
Strangely, people applauded. They weren’t used to seeing someone admit a mistake like that.
Although people were really nice about the mistake, it would have been a lot less embarrassing if I had just approached the school board president or the superintendent and asked what happens if there’s a tied vote.
(Also, when I was running my own newspaper, I made sure that mistakes in front-page stories had corrections on the front page, mistakes in sports stories had corrections on the sports page, etc.)
Another thing I learned there was to specify if you get information about a meeting story from anything other than the meeting itself. At later meetings of the school board and the Ely City Council, I would ask questions during breaks in the meeting or after the meeting and include that information in my articles. But the problem was that people who attended the meeting or listened to it on the radio would assume I was making stuff up because they hadn’t heard it during the meeting. (And yes, a local radio station did interrupt regular programming to broadcast City Council meetings live.)
Once I realized readers were getting confused, I would write something like, “In an interview during a break in the meeting, ______ said ______.”
Beyond that, the other advice I’d offer to young people: Learn touch typing. The most useful class I took in high school was typing; this is something I use every day. It’s especially useful in journalism, but even if you do a completely different type of work, being able to type quickly and accurately without looking at the keyboard will be amazingly useful.