A Classy Class Visit from Another Tiger

Nicole Agee speaks March 22, 2022 in a Mount Mercy University journalism class. This image was made by a student in the class--images in this post are about half my work, half student work.

The focus of good journalism shouldn’t be the journalist—an important point made by Nicole Agee, a local TV anchor (KCRG-TV Channel 9, Cedar Rapids, Iowa) in one of my classes.

“I’m not the story, the people I interview are the story,” she said.

Agee kindly volunteered to visit the class and talk about journalism storytelling, in particular, storytelling via video. As a sample, she showed a clip from KOMU, the Columbia, Missouri TV station associated with the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism.

In video, the images and sounds are a key part of the reporting. Video in a story, Agee said, “takes the place of words.”

Here and below, four more image of Nicole Agee speaking.

It’s a large and complicated idea—it helps explain many of the differences between journalists who primarily work in words (we used to call it “print,” although these days, I read New York Times stories on a screen) vs those who are using video recordings. Agee also noted that radio, such as presented by NPR, is another medium with its own story telling style.

But whether words, video or audio, a journalist needs to be an accurate and compelling story teller.

Besides that, I think a beginning journalist needs to be ready to dive in—to get more experience however they can. Agee herself noted a history as a high school and college newspaper journalist before pursuing a graduate degree in broadcasting at Mizzou.

Agee also had some interesting thoughts on the skills needed to be a journalist. Primarily, she argued for the centrality of journalistic curiosity. “We want to know more, we want to know why,” Agee said.

In fact, she said it’s easier to work with a curious new journalist than with a new journalist who considers themself primarily a great writer. “It’s easy to train somebody to write well,” said.

Well, she’s wrong about that and right about it at the same time. A person has to have some base level language expression skills in order to be competent enough to be trainable as a writer. And I think curiosity is a driving force of most really good writers—to be a writer is not just to have facility with the language, it’s to have facility with ideas that can be expressed in language, which requires curiosity.

Annie Barkalow, managing editor of the MMU Times, listens to Nicole Agee.

But she’s right, too. Given a base level of writing competence, it’s easier to work on the information processing skills—whether writing, making images or shooting video—of a curious person. Students who struggle in one of my editing courses don’t always agree, but anybody can learn to create a page or web site using InDesign. What’s harder to teach is what should be on the page.

What’s required is the curiosity to seek new answers to common questions. Where do you go for information? What information is important for an audience you’re serving?

Curiosity may kill cats, but it is the life force of journalists.

So, although I work a lot at trying to teach writing—I think I’m fundamentally in agreement with Agee.

Me, helping a student solve a problem with a camera.

She made another key point, too. That is, a journalist must cultivate connections. She referred to building a personal Rolex when you arrive in a new community (while noting the term is outdated, today a network of contacts may be more related to a list on an Android phone than written cards that are quickly becoming antiques). In other words, a good journalist is active and aware and builds contacts before they must begin working on a given story.

I like to think of it as related to the role of imagination in journalism. That is, journalism, if done correctly, is not at all fiction. None of it is made up. But a journalist must be able to see possibilities, to sense patterns—not to impose narratives, to but recognize them and act on them. That’s related to the challenges of writing and editing, but also to the ability to think creatively when casting the net for information—for cultivating and well using a wide range of connections. An information, or source, network.

I can't imagine what Nicole Agee was thinking about here, but whatever, it was worth listening to here.

And the best photographers and videographers also have imagination. Again, not for deep fakes, but to know when to shoot and what to shoot and where to be to get the image or the recording.

The class Agee visited was small—the smallest introduction to journalism class I’ve had in my time as a professor. Yet, as she noted, the skills one learns in a newsroom—working on deadline, being flexible, imaging the possibilities, acting on your curiosity—serve professionals in a variety of circumstances.

She was speaking of the many former journalists she knows who are working in other venues. I think it is one reason why college journalism remains important for a university. Of course, student journalists serve their community as journalists serve any community, by making overt what is hidden and should be known. But they serve themselves, too—developing habits of mind and skills that are keys to a curious, interesting, well-written life.

Final image.

Murdered Mother, Her Children and Images of War

Somehow, photography still, in 2022, packs an emotional punch. It is a medium that freezes a moment in time.

The March 7 edition of The New York Times featured a photograph of a mother, her two children and a volunteer who was helping them attempt to flee to safety in Irpin, Ukraine who died in a Russian mortar barrage.

From NYTimes.com, web site of New York Times, the famous image by Lynsey Addario, published on the paper's front page .

It’s a stark, dark moment in a stark, dark war. And a reminder of what photography can sometimes do. Think of the emotional punch of the picture of the crying girl over a body at Kent State. Or the fleeting Vietnamese girl, running naked from her village which has just been napalmed.

And now we have Tetiana Perbyinis and her two children, Mykyta and Alisa, teen boy and a young girl, along with a 26-year-old volunteer who had been helping them, dead on the street.

Image posted on Twitter by New York Times.

American newspaper editors tend to be more prudish about these things than many of their international counterparts, and I’m OK with that. Images of excessive blood or badly damaged human remains are seen as being too cruel, inflicting pain on the family of victims of violence.

Although, in this case, as a follow-up New York Times story details, the husband would rather that the image be shared so the world knows what the Russian military did, what happened to his loved ones.

The Washington Post had an interesting reflection March 9 on how journalists decide what images are not too awful to publish in cases of stories like this. Paul Farhi reports that Times editors didn’t hesitate with this image, considering it too important to the story that needs to be told.

Well, yes, although one issue with an image like this is that the emotional content brings a deep reaction, but not necessarily a lot of insight. How did this happen? What is the context of this war? When are such civilian deaths merely the accidental outcome of conflict vs. the end goal of a country’s actions? Seeing the image itself doesn’t answer anything, nor does it tell us about Teiana, Mykyta, Alisa nor Anatoly Berezhnyi, the man who died with them.

As war in Ukraine has unfolded, I have not widely sampled all American media. I read AP reports in my local paper, The Gazette. I watch CNN and MSNBC reports at night. I listen to radio news from NPR. I find myself often checking the New York Times web site—via computer and my phone—partly because, as a professor at the college where I teach, the Times is made available to me by my institution.

So I can’t speak in broad terms about how this war is covered. But I can say that I have appreciated the depth of the New York Times efforts to cover this war. Journalism, done well, is so important at a dark hour such as ours now.

Lynsey Addario, the experienced photographer who rushed out to make this heart-wrenching image, fulfilled her role here. She witnessed and recorded. These days, images are often not trusted, but everything surrounding this one suggests it was authentic and honest, not some deep fake.

And horrible. And maybe that’s the point.

The freezing of an instant in time. The snap of a shutter after the crack of a mortar shell. And the world bears witness. Let’s hope that sad emotions aren’t the only response. If war journalism does nothing else, at least it forces all of us to recognize what is going on.

Yes, wars happen all the time. And we should pay attention when the victims of violence aren’t 43-year-old white accountants and computer programmers—tan, black, brown and yellow victims of war are just as human and suffer as much pain. Nor can merely learning about such violence be enough to stop it.

But it won’t be stopped if we don’t learn. Even if we do need the words to get the context, the image is an important part of that learning, creating an indelible memory of a tragic moment in time that should not be forgotten.