Too many times, the response to a final project draft was a mediocre grade, followed by something to this effect:
There isn't much reporting, which gets me thinking, how can we write something when we don't know what we have from our sources? There really isn't anything to evaluate here. It's nice writing, but it's almost entirely free of any substance. It's empty calories without thorough reporting.
And that's a problem.
That's because journalism isn't about writing; it's about reporting. We don't write based on our artistic ability to write; we write based on what we discovered by talking to people and looking at documents and considering statistics and such. The structure of the story is entirely determined by the facts we have.
So it was pretty troubling to me seeing people write drafts with one or even no interviews at all! If we're writing based on assumptions and then plugging in quotes where we assume they belong, that's not journalism.
Journalism is, first we get all the facts; then, we figure out what the story really is -- and not necessarily what we assumed it would be -- and only then do we decide what the lede and the structure of the story are.
What we're doing is like taking a scientific theory and writing it up as a fact before we've even run any tests. At best, it's worthless in absence of any experimenting to prove or disprove it; at worst, it's misleading.
Along those lines, what I was primarily grading on was proof that you had done substantial reporting, primarily in the form of the number and quality of interviews to date. For us to be legit journalists, that is the litmus test we need to ace every time.
There's no substitute for reporting.
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