From the April 20 Star:
A cutaway shot in the just-released State of Play, yet another newspaper melodrama, shows a plaque on a reporter's desk that reads: Never Trust An Editor. Too true.
The movie bristles with atmospheric verisimilitude, despite absurd plot developments and some in-your-dreams scoop distortions to advance the storyline. Not even legendary cop reporter Jocko Thomas would have had the kind of access to crime scenes and coroner's labs depicted here.
(Further, crime reporting is a beat now being dropped by many big city dailies as staffing is slashed. The Baltimore Sun recently replaced its veteran crime reporter with a cheap young blogger to comment and riff, perchance to tweet, rather than dig and develop. That means, in a crime-infested metropolis such as Baltimore, nobody's keeping an eye on either the cops or the crooks. But I digress.)
See this post from March 1: No one left to keep an eye on the killing streets of Baltimore
A fat and slovenly Russell Crowe – must be confused with sports writers – is the investigative crime reporter at a Washington broadsheet under new ownership; Canadian cutie Rachel McAdams the "blogging" recent hire.
Their hostile relationship accurately reflects newsroom tensions between old-style journalists – for whom no story is real unless it's published on paper – and website, or blogging, specialists who are usually younger, less mindful of checking facts and sloppy in wordcraft. Of course, there's no time to polish or contextualize in round-the-clock feeding of the web beastie.
Crowe's character is apparently never required to file to the web and there are few of us who enjoy that luxury these multi-tasking days. A reporter friend I ran into last week from a competing publication had orders to re-file on her ongoing story every hour – didn't matter if there was nothing new to add – plus take pictures, plus shoot video for online posting.
The actual next-day paper is increasingly becoming an afterthought and costly nuisance, hence the move toward – horrors! – all-online newspapers. The "paper" part is turning into a redundancy.
I guess nearly six years with a TV organization has left me out of touch with newspapers, but how many print reporters still believe "no story is real unless it's published on paper"?
It's true that reporters must be more skilled at multi-tasking than ever before.
The problem is that the more of everything else you do -- photos, video, blog, tweet, whatever -- then the less time left for actual reporting. And finding stuff out is the core of this craft.
I'm going to wait to see State of Play in second run (it doesn't compel me), but I think one useful angle for such a movie that wants to explore the issues affecting modern journalism is a reporter who missed something or otherwise screwed up a story because they were doing too much of everything else.
(You have just seen an excellent example of why I would suck at screenwriting. :) )
I gather that some of this tension is explored in the blogger-reporter duel.
I would have liked to hear DiManno's thoughts on this (two tweets from April 10):
- I'm greatly amused by people tut-tutting about this movie trailer line: 'Good reporters don't have friends, only sources.' (1/2)
- Judith Miller was friends with her sources amongst the Bushies. Fat lot of good that did U.S. journalism. (2/2)
That doesn't mean you don't like or respect your sources. It does mean you should maintain some wariness and skepticism in dealing with them.
DiManno's an accomplished veteran journalist. I would have liked to hear her thoughts on that.