Originally published: 13th February, 2015
When I started my career as a journalist in 1995, I realised pretty quickly that despite my skills as a writer, I knew precisely nothing about being a reporter. Being able to write is table stakes, something which gains you entry to the door marked “journalism” but doesn’t actually make you a reporter. Everyone can write. Not everyone can report.
I remember the moment I realised what the difference was clearly. My first real reporting task, after a month or so of menial work in the testing labs, involved going along armed with a notebook and eager as anything to a press conference for the release of a Tektronix printer1.
The reporting didn’t take place at the press conference, which was as staged and dull as these things always are. Instead, it took place afterwards, in a bar, with some of the old-school printing trade press journalists (in the days when there was such a thing as the printing trade press). Listening to them talk, I realised the fundamental thing: Journalism is gossip. Professionalised, occasionally slightly pissed, but gossip nevertheless. I could do this. I had never wanted to be a journalist, but suddenly and permanently I had found my home.
And boy did it feel good. For the next ten years or so, I did every kind of technology journalism: reviews, features, columns, and my favourite of all, news. Newswriting was always the best kind of reporting because it was the place where you could really make a mark – or at least you could if you were any good. And MacUser lived on its exclusives, on stories which other Mac publications didn’t even get a sniff of. We prided ourselves on getting stories which companies really didn’t want to be published. Our duty was the readers, and we were fierce about getting the truth for them. If it was revealing a new product’s upcoming release, thus killing off sales of a previous model, so what? We’d saved our readers from buying a dud. If that company then got so outraged at our behaviour they pulled advertising, then fuck ’em – whether you advertised or not didn’t get you any influence on the editorial. Companies knew it, too.
How do you get the stories before anyone else? By gossiping. By understanding that reporting is about people, relationships, who you know, how you talk to them. We bandy around the phrase “cultivating sources”, but all that means is getting to know people and getting them to trust you. Never selling sources down the river, but always being aware of what someone is telling you and why they are telling you.
I’m reminded of all this by the death of David Carr. Carr wasn’t just an average reporter: he got under the skin of his chosen beat, and knew that reporting was fundamentally about people. Watch Carr at work in “Page One”, the documentary which is nominally about his employer but which turns quickly into the David Carr Show. Look at the way he talks on the phone, the easy venom which he drips on the hapless founders of Vice, who, despite their supposed new media smarts, come across like amateurs. This is a man who understands journalism is about people. As his colleague A. O. Scott puts it:
“What else?” was the question that would punctuate every conversation with him. What were you working on? What did you think of this or that political event, show-business caper or piece of office gossip? How was your family? What were you thinking? This was sincere, friendly curiosity, the expression of a naturally gregarious temperament. But it was also the operation of a tireless journalistic instinct. David was always hungry for stories. He was a collector of personalities and anecdotes, a shrewd and compassionate judge of character. A warrior for the truth.
The fundamental thing about journalism remains the same as it’s been for a hundred years: Whatever you do, get the story. Everything else is ancillary. And stories come from, and are about, people. Remember that the next time some journalistic pundit with a safe job in a university calls publishing “a technology business”.
