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Journalism of Courage
Last week my daughter came racing into the house, begging me to come outside and talk to a classmate who will be off to Northwestern University come fall, to study reporting and writing. 8220;What do you want to do?8221; I asked Sam, as we talked under the basketball hoop in the driveway. She said she wanted to write, maybe for a magazine, someday. 8220;Magazines are supposed to be dying,8221; I told her, trying to be candid, while silently rejoicing that someone so smart 8212; and so young! 8212; was so eager to become a journalist.
The conversation went on, about journalism in general, and stopped. But I8217;m picking it up, right now, grateful for the reminder that journalism matters and that extraordinary people work in this craft. That came from looking back on a decade of work by my colleague at Newsday, Lauren Terrazzano, 39, who died Tuesday after a fierce struggle with cancer.
Lauren, with her tight, wild curls and wide, blue eyes, was a woman possessed when she stalked a good story. The ones that meant the most to her were about people in trouble, especially poor and powerless people.
But that 8220;who8221; was never enough. Lauren doggedly went after the 8220;why,8221; too, tracking down the bureaucrat or institution responsible for harming people, and especially children.
She was key to Newsday8217;s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the explosion of TWA Flight 800 in July 1996, winning the trust of families who lost loved ones on that horrific night.
It8217;s a difficult journalism, the kind old-school reporters like me fear is falling out of favour because it requires time and expertise 8212; two commodities fast disappearing as news gathering falls prey to the voodoo economics of buyouts of newsroom veterans and thinning staffs. But Sam, know this: It8217;s work that nourishes a reporter8217;s soul. It did for Lauren.
Hey, Sam, here8217;s what we should have talked about in the driveway:
The best journalists make demands on their audience. Laugh, their words implore.
Or cry. Make it stop, the prose commands.
Or do something to make life better. The best reporters know how to grip readers by the shoulders and pull them, paragraph by paragraph, into a world readers know little or nothing about. Look here, the words say. Pay attention.
Listen. Learn.
That was Lauren at her best, pushing unsuspecting readers into a flophouse or a children8217;s prison. The best reporters leave big footprints, sow seeds of change. Lauren was part of a reporting team whose series on abuses at assisted-living centres led to a change in state law. The most gifted reporters effortlessly bridge the gap between subject and reporter and, later, between writer and reader, making distractions such as age, class, or race disappear. Lauren8217;s final work was an unflinching look at the last days of her life, about living with cancer. Lauren worked as she lived, with a vigour, purpose and passion no communications school can teach. It8217;s a path not easy to follow.
But you should try, Sam. Please, try.
