Mencher Chapter 1:

The Traits of Good Reporters

Hard-working

Being hard-working is important in any career. But it’s especially important in journalism, because journalism is still largely a meritocracy. A meritocracy is where you are judged on your performance, not on seniority.

Maggie Haberman is one of the hardest-working reporters out there. She's a White House correspondent for The New York Times and a political analyst for CNN. Haberman's career began at the New York Post where she covered City Hall and got hooked on political reporting. Haberman then moved to the New York Daily News and later the website Politico.
Haberman was hired by The New York Times in early 2015 to cover the U.S. presidential campaign. In covering the Trump White House, Haberman became a journalistic star who dug up many scoops about the administration. In 2018, Haberman's reporting on the Trump administration earned the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Trump has responded to negative articles by Haberman by calling her a "Hillary flunky" and a "third rate reporter."
 

Enterprising

Being an enterprising reporter means being able to find stories that fly under the radar. That's just what Washington Port reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did in the 1970s with the Watergate scandal that eventually led to Richard Nixon resigning as president.

Woodward and Bernstein were assigned to report on the June 17, 1972, burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in a Washington, D.C., office building called Watergate. They did a series of stories revealing the political "dirty tricks" used by the Nixon re-election committee. Their book about the scandal, All the President's Men, became a No. 1 bestseller and was later turned into a movie. The 1976 film, starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, turned the reporters into celebrities and inspired a wave of interest in investigative journalism.

Dependable under pressure

In April 1995 a man named Timothy McVeigh parked a truck full of explosives in front of the federal government building in Oklahoma City, then walked away. Minutes later the truck exploded and the building was destroyed. More than 160 people were killed and hundreds more were seriously injured. It was the worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history prior to the 9/11 attacks. 

On that day Rick Bragg was working in the Atlanta Bureau of the New York Times, the papers closest Bureau to Oklahoma City. Editors at the Times headquarters got Bragg on the phone and told him to get to Oklahoma City as fast as he could. Bragg caught the first flight out of Atlanta, landed in Oklahoma City, got a rental car and raced to the scene of the disaster. He scrambled to do as many interviews and gather as much information as he could, but by this time it was late afternoon and his deadline was fast approaching. He finally sat down at his laptop to start writing, and the laptop crashed. After plenty of cursing and banging of said laptop, Bragg got the thing to work. By this time he had less than an hour before his deadline to write a page one story for the New York Times on the worst act of domestic terrorism in US history. He finished the story on time, it got into the paper and Bragg ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize – print journalism’s highest honor - for that story.

Curious

Journalists cover the world, so it makes sense that they must be curious about the world and everything in it. Journalists are typically omnivores when it comes to their interests - many of them are interested in many, many things. If you go to a party attended by journalists they'll be talking about everything from sports and the arts to politics and the state of the world. They have a hunger to discover how things work and why the world is the way it is.

Knowledgeable

Journalists must be knowledgeable because their job to write about the world and everything in it. If you're a general assignment reporter, for instance, you might cover a homicide on Monday, a house fire on Tuesday, interview the mayor about the city budget on Wednesday, interview an author who has a new book out on Thursday and do a movie review on Friday. The more you know, the better you are at your job, and it helps if you can learn quickly, as you go.

That's why the best journalists are inveterate readers. They read everything, from the back of the cereal box at breakfast to newspapers, news websites, nonfictions books and novels, etc. They understand that your education doesn't end the day you get your college degree. Education is a lifelong undertaking and to be a good journalists you must continually add to your storehouse of knowledge.

Compassionate

There's a stereotype that portrays journalists as self-absorbed and cynical. But shedding light on the plight of those less fortunate than us is at the core of what journalism is all about. So it makes sense that journalists must be compassionate in order to do those stories justice, whether it's writing about what life is like as homeless person on the streets of a big city in winter to covering the aftermath of a hurricane in which thousands of people have lost family members or their homes - or both. 

Courageous

Most of the time, journalists never face danger on the job. But in certain situations - covering a war is an obvious example - they do. (By the way. journalists who cover wars volunteer to do so. No one is ever forced to cover combat.) Sometimes, reporters must face the choice of whether they should carry a gun. But journalists are not combatants, we are observers. And we don't put ourselves in such situation in order to be heroes. We are there to write about what's happening. 

And you don't have to be in a war to face  some level of danger. At riot at the nation's capitol in January, pro-Trump mobs targeted journalists for their attacks. In many countries around the world, typically those run by dictators and tyrants, reporters routinely risk their lives just to report on what the government is doing.

Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons and Unsplash