“I heard s**t went down.”
In a letter in Tuesday’s issue, “Good journalism needs good quotes,” a reader, not unkindly, criticized Luke Holmen for using a quote in a story about reported nonsense that happened at Lobo Village over the weekend.
He implied that Luke wasn’t taking his reporting seriously when he gathered the quote, and he offered a few pieces of journalistic advice to my colleague about who to quote when chasing a story: “A good journalist quotes not those who hear about what happened, but those who saw what happened.”
He encouraged him to quote students who can provide eyewitness examples. In this case, I assume the reader would have preferred quotes from students who saw the 5-0 banging on doors and citations flurrying about the apartments.
Never mind that if there’s anything history has taught us, it’s that the first thought going through a student’s mind when the fuzz show up and said student has an ill-gotten can of alcohol in his hand is most assuredly not “Oh, let me talk to this intrepid reporter,” but “Run! Run, dammit!”
Add that said student is probably on his own for the first time and being bankrolled by parents, and he’s going to be in Sandoval County before the cop takes his pen out.
When choosing quotes, journalists choose not only the informative ones, but ones that strike emotional chords — the juicy ones that make you go “Woah, they said that?” With any luck, they’ll know something in the bargain.
There’s an unfortunate fact of journalism that the letter writer fails to recognize, and it is that “I heard s**t went down” is sometimes the best you’re going to get.
There are those who don’t want to talk to the press, those who didn’t see anything at all whether they were there or not, those just simply not articulate enough to form a decent sentence and, worst of all, those who simply don’t know anything.
It’s part of the territory — a part that I seem to be revisiting more and more often — and that’s unfortunate, particularly on a college campus. It’s difficult to do a piece on students’ reactions to the situation in Tripoli when most don’t know what Tripoli is, or that Gadhafi is not Gandhi.
You can’t get a decent quote about London if a student doesn’t know that London is burning. How can you write about world affairs when the only state visit that most students know about is the cast of “Jersey Shore” going to Italy?
I remember last year during the Gulf Oil Spill, I asked a good friend of mine, a fellow student, what he thought of the disaster. I reprint his response in totality for you below:
“What?”
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The oil spill in the Gulf, I told him. You know, the BP tanker that is dumping millions of gallons of crude and destroying an entire industry in a matter of days?
“Nah, man. I don’t know about that.”
See? That isn’t even “I heard s**t went down” caliber. My friend, who has a Twitter feed, a Facebook page, a Tumblr, and constantly video chats with scores of friends, had heard nothing.
And I realized that if he hadn’t, it’s likely the people with whom he communicated hadn’t as well. There’s no effort required anymore to get nearly any information you want; unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any effort to get any kind of information you might need. Another friend of mine, to pick on the crew from the “Shore” again, bristles if you call her JWOWW, but has no idea what the Department of State is.
She’s a high school graduate, folks.
I remember mornings in middle school and high school when our eyes were barely open and we poured ourselves into those desks.
“Channel One News” would come on. These were days long before Lisa Ling was known for her work on “The View;” she was simply known to hundreds of thousands of eighth and ninth graders for her somber, whispered reporting on tragic situations in Bosnia and Yugoslavia.
The camera would pan from her to just over a barbed-wire fence where children and families were starving, or rebels were poised to start a revolution for independence somewhere. We may have moaned and groaned and only been interested in the Mountain Dew commercials and the popular songs they played as bumper music, but like a form of televised osmosis, we would all keep something from those broadcasts.
A smattering of us would, at one point or another, before mercilessly taunting one another over who completely bombed the “Pop Quiz,” engage in a serious discussion of What Is Happening in the World.
I don’t know if they have Channel One anymore, or if it has become too much of an annoyance for teachers who are overworked and underpaid and have too much to cover in too short of a time. I think we need it though.
We need the “Pop Quiz” and the Mountain Dew Commercials and somber, serious Lisa Ling to remind us that there is an entire world outside of MTV’s cameras. There’s life after the finals and classes and grades. Indeed, there’s s**t going down, and students should make an effort to learn about it, talk about it and know about it. That way, they’ll be able to give the kind of quote that the letter writer yearns for.
