Dear Readers:
Dr. Ink is feeling more than a bit melancholy this week as his friend Jim Naughton retires as president of The Poynter Institute. In less than a decade, Jim has led Poynter to a position of international influence. He hired Bill Mitchell to create Poynter.org, and encouraged Bill to hire the incomparable Jim Romenesko.
Then came the events of September 11, 2001, and it turned out that Jim had put in place the people and the resources needed to create a site many journalists would turn to each day. But Jim’s brilliance was not in being able to see the potential of the Poynter website in any visionary sense. His contribution was to see the untapped potential in the lessons, cases studies, essays, toolboxes, and tip sheets created by Poynter faculty and the professionals who came to St. Petersburg, Fla., for seminars. Why not spread those resources around, he wondered. Isn’t that a way to help journalists fulfill their mission?
Dr. Ink began working at The Poynter Institute (then the Modern Media Institute) in 1979. One of his first jobs was to edit the very first edition of “Best Newspaper Writing,” a project now celebrating its silver anniversary. The first award-winning writer in that first book was Richard Ben Cramer, who was covering the war in the Middle East for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
His editor was a man named Jim Naughton, and Dr. Ink (in the persona of his boring creator) interviewed Naughton as well as Cramer.
Here’s how that conversation went:
Q: What makes Cramer so good?
Naughton: He’s one of the best writers I’ve ever encountered in journalism. He’s got an eye for detail, an ear for meter and lifestyles and the way people talk that is phenomenal. He is equally good at reporting and writing.
Q: What is the secret of his success in writing foreign news?
Naughton: What he does is write about real flesh and blood human beings instead of nameless, faceless governments. There is a trap, a very seductive trap, for national and foreign correspondents and particularly for people who work in places like Washington, to write stories in which the lead says “the White House announced yesterday,” or “France said yesterday.” It’s insane. What Cramer did was to set out and consciously write about people, to find the people lurking behind the institutions, the people affected by governmental policies. Most of what he did was to cover events such as the movement toward peace in the Middle East from the perspective of people who would be the beneficiaries of the search for peace. I think we don’t do enough of that, not just in foreign coverage, but in all journalism.
Naughton was right back then, and he’s still right. In more than 300 columns, Dr. Ink has never addressed another person directly, preferring instead the erudite and self-referential third person. He drops that pose now, with all his heart, and says: Thanks, Jim, for everything. Bon voyage.
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