Reporter goes to school

The secrets of journalism: a report from inside their training camp

by Chris LaVigne <clavigne@republic-news.org>

I'm joining a sacred profession with no less a responsibility than holding up our country's very democracy. It's a mighty task and I sure hope I'm up to it.

I'm going to be a journalist and have just started my eight-month post-grad certificate program at Langara College. It sounds pretty grueling: eight or nine hours a day of classes as well as responsibility for writing and editing the journalism department's newspaper, the Voice.

I got my start writing for the student newspaper at Simon Fraser University, but it wasn't until I started writing regularly for The Republic a couple of years ago that the journalism bug really bit me. There are so many stories to tell, and so many local newspapers messing them up so badly that they need to be told again with the facts straight.

A lot of what I wrote for this paper involved criticism of the media, a topic that's near and dear to the hearts of most Republic writers and readers. We love to hate the media, but then, they do a good job of deserving it a lot of the time. The question we all want answered is "Who's to blame?" Why have journalists become one of the least trusted professions in North America? They're considered less honest than lawyers!

I'm going to be writing in these pages about my experiences as a journalist-in-training to give you an insider's view on what kind of skills, behaviours, and attitudes a journalist is expected to learn before becoming a part of the media. After only four days of classes, almost all of my teachers—a group of professionals with years of experience as reporters, foreign correspondents, copy editors, editors, broadcasters, and columnists—have already warned us that journalism is in a state of crisis and that my generation of graduates will be forced to clean up the profession's tarnished reputation. That's a heavy load to bear.

The Langara program is very practical. As one instructor put it, "We don't do much navel-gazing." I wonder if this reflects journalism in general. All the traditional notions of impartiality, fairness, and balance that journalists usually talk about have always made me worry in the same way as if my doctor was telling me about the benefits of leeches and bloodletting. Progress has been made in our conception of how truth is determined since journalism was founded, but one rarely sees that progress reflected in the pages, voices, or images that make up modern media. Could this inability to adapt to the lessons of postmodernism be part of the problem?

There are plenty of other problems, to be sure. One of my instructors complained that too many journalists have become mere stenographers; press scrums in particular have become embarrassingly ineffectual. Another worried that the media exists now only to serve corporate priorities and their profit imperatives. All my instructors have expressed concerns that I'm sure most Republic readers share. Important news is being edged out by celebrity worship in major newspapers and investigative journalism is considered too expensive to be worthwhile. Reporters are expected to "roll with the punches" when it comes to writing news stories that are designed to attract advertisers. “Throwaway” commuter tabloids are designed by international corporations to deliver advertisements to demographics rather than news to citizens.

How can we make things better? The most important skills a journalist can have, my instructors have explained, are skepticism and curiosity. As someone who wants to make it my career, I'm very curious about journalism, but I have to admit that I'm very skeptical as well. Why do so many people—including myself—distrust the very people that we're supposed to be able to trust the most? What are journalists doing wrong? And who's to blame? I hope to share with you the ways that my classmates and I grapple with these questions and to give you the inside scoop on how a new generation of journalists are being trained.

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Have a question about journalism you think Chris should ask in class? Send him an e-mail at clavigne@republic-news.org and he'll try to get your query answered.