Here are excerpts from a talk by Eugene Roberts, Jr., that he gave at the University of Southern California School of Journalism when he was the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Presume the talk was given yesterday. Write 350 to 400 words:
These days, almost every editors meeting I go to seems to have a group of panelists who either imply—or say head on—that the survival of Western journalism depends on the quick adoption of a three-part formula:
- Drastically increasing the number of stories we run.
- Writing shorter and shorter stories.
- And making our front pages look like transcripts of the six o'clock television news with color graphics.
It is not that I don't believe in short stories and news briefs. Indeed, we recast The Philadelphia Inquirer so that it bristled each day with short summaries and news digests...
So I'm not saying that brevity is bad. What I am saying is that as government gets bigger and more unwieldy, as society gets more complex, as science and technology explode, as issues get more opaque and overwhelming, the old-fashioned, time-honored, inverted-pyramid, one-column-or-less, wire-service-style news story becomes more inadequate.
Let me emphasize that I used the word "inadequate"—and not the words "obsolete" or "unimportant"—in describing this kind of story. The conventional story will work most of the time, perhaps as much as 80 or 90 percent of the time.
Obviously, the major reason for the existence of daily newspapers is that they, in fact, report the news daily, as it happens. But I am suggesting that for the other 10 or 20 percent of the time, the conventional story doesn't work. Sometimes with important and complex stories, newspapers confuse the reader by giving him or her daily dribs and drabs—punchy little shorts that stimulate but don't stake the appetite for information. People are prepared for a short-hand version of events on radio and television, but not—to the exclusion of all else—in their daily paper.
And it is to this remaining 10 or 20 percent of news coverage that I turn my attention today. I am not sure that it is always what everyone would call investigative reporting, but it is almost always difficult and hard-to-do and time-consuming reporting. And when it is done well, it explains to readers things they should know and will find important to their lives. On The Inquirer, we stayed away from the term "investigative stories" or "explanatory journalism" in favor of terms like "take-outs" or "project pieces" or "enterprise stories."
The finest reporting, whether short or long, is always investigative in that it digs, and digs, and digs. And the finest writing is almost by definition explanatory in that it puts things so vividly, so compellingly that readers can see and understand and comprehend.
One of the reasons I don't much use the term "investigative reporting" is that it misleads and it confuses. To many people investigative reporting means nailing a crook or catching a politician with his pants down. This, I think, is too narrow a definition. And, these days, catching a politician with his pants down does not require a great deal of investigating.
And while The Philadelphia Inquirer is reputed to do quite a bit of investigative reporting, we didn't put a heavy premium on the catch-a-crook variety, or the exposure of the sexual secrets of politicians. I couldn't, for example, imagine assigning an investigative team to explore Pat Robertson's premarital sex or to determine whether a would-be Supreme Court Justice smoked pot twenty years ago.
At The Inquirer, investigative reporting meant freeing a reporter from the normal constraints of time and space and letting the reporter really inform the public about a situation of vital importance. It meant coming to grips with a society grown far too complex to be covered merely with news briefs or a snappy color graphic.
Some papers fail their readers by refusing to do any investigative reporting at all. Still other papers try to do investigative reporting but go astray by narrowly defining it as unearthing a wrong-doer. This immediately casts reporters as cops rather than as gatherers of information.
Think, for a moment, about tax coverage. A paper distorts if it only covers the revenue department's press conferences and never looks into how the department decides which tax returns it will audit.
But suppose a paper grants that investigative reporting is desirable, how does the paper go about getting it? The short answer is commitment.
To do in-depth reporting on a sustained basis of more than a couple of stories a year requires that the highest levels of a paper be concerned and committed. You especially need commitment on space.
It also is important for a paper to provide reporters with time, although a reporter all by himself can sometimes scrounge the time—an hour here, a day there. He can scrimp on travel. I once knew a reporter—a dedicated man named Charlie Black—who badgered his paper to send him to cover the war in Vietnam. The paper, I am told, finally agreed, gave him $100 in expense money and told him to return when the money was gone.
Charlie came back more than six months later and gave the editors something like $22 in change. He never saw the inside of a hotel room. He simply moved into the field with the troops and slept on the ground. He produced some of the most interesting reporting of the war because he reported first-hand on the life and problems of the combat soldier.
But a reporter all by himself, even if he has scrounged the time and gotten the story, has real problems if his or her newspaper will not deliver the space. You simply cannot do an in-depth job in a standard one or two column newspaper hole. The right reason for a newspaper to provide space for project reporting is that it opens windows into society, into government, into problems and opportunities. Windows that, chances are, will never be opened if the newspaper doesn't open them.
The wrong reasons are for mere shock value, or impact or to win awards. And if you seek awards for awards' sake, they probably will not come. At The Inquirer, we won a good number of major journalism prizes, but those awards came only as a by-product of our coverage. We asked ourselves constantly if we were really getting to the guts of a story. And if the answer was no, we redoubled our efforts.
The result was at the end of the year, we often had a dozen or so things we were proud of.
Don Barlett and Jim Steele of The Inquirer wrote an exhaustive series on the failed federal policies for disposal of nuclear waste. The story was a blistering indictment of mismanagement and neglect within the nuclear industry and the government. It warned of dire consequences and real health hazards. The series did not win one major award, possibly because it was ahead of the news, as the best of investigative series almost always are. But almost every month that passes sees the validation of yet another warning raised by the series...
A newspaper that contains nothing more than shorts and briefs and colorful graphics may be the easy way to attract readers, but it isn't the right way. Nor, often, the most effective way...
Investigative reporting ... means coming to grips with a society grown far too complex to be covered merely with news briefs or a snappy color graphic.
Without a willingness to undertake investigative reporting, a newspaper fails its readers in fundamental ways. It shortchanges them. It gives them incomplete coverage. It fails to provide a journalistic follow-through...
(Used with the permission of Eugene Roberts.)
