Byron Pitts, photo by Tom Cawthon
If you had asked a young Byron Pitts what he wanted to be when he grew up, he wouldn’t have answered with “astronaut” or “firefighter.” His reply, even then, was “’60 Minutes’ reporter.”
Now the chief national correspondent for ABC News and co-anchor of “Nightline,” Pitts knew before he could read that he wanted to work as a television reporter on a major network. When he got his first job on television, he knew he had to work even harder to make it to the network.
“I wanted to be successful in television. I wanted to begin to model successful people, so I wanted to really study it. So I needed three TV sets, three VCRs, to record ABC, CBS and NBC. And that was my homework. I would record the morning news programs and the evening news programs,” he said.
From how to hold a microphone to how to write and construct a story, Pitts learned from watching others in his field. When he got his first reporting job in Greenville, North Carolina, he kept learning and trying to get better.
“I would sit at home and watch the news and study it, and it became like going to the movies, going to a club, that was what I enjoyed doing. To pick up the habits of people I thought were successful.”
During two events Friday at the Poynter Institute, Pitts shared advice for journalists who might be studying him the way he studied Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer.
“Being a journalist is like being a carpenter. It’s a craft,” he said. Here are five takeaways from Pitts’ Master Class (broadcast live and available in replay on NewsU and his Poynter Institute community conversation, “Race & America,” which was held Friday night.)
1. On finding nuance when reporting on race:
“There is a Ferguson in every community,” Pitts said during the community conversation, expanding on a point he’d made earlier in the day as well. “Do your job and find it.” The story of Ferguson isn’t just about race, Pitts said, just as no story is that one-dimensional. “Race is an incredibly important conversation, but in some ways it can be distracting from the greater conversation that should be had in America, about access to opportunity, about class issues, about the importance of diversity.” Reporters often miss these stories, he said, because they don’t live in the communities they report on. Journalists are products of America, he said, and America is a “microwave society” that expects things to happen quickly and issues to be fixed quickly. The more nuanced issues such as race and class are more complicated to cover.
2. On the importance of diversity in newsrooms:
Journalists sometimes take the easy way out when they report on communities with which they may be unfamiliar, Pitts said during the community conversation. “Why is the woman with gold teeth on the news?” Pitts asked. When something tragic happens or a crime is committed, journalists rush to the community to get a reaction, he said, and they end up speaking to whomever is home during the day. Often, the people who have jobs are at work, so the news reflects an incomplete image of a community because journalists there may not familiar with what the complete image of that community looks like. The lack of diversity in newsrooms, Pitts said, allows these incomplete images to slide by.
3. On networking:
Pitts writes thank you notes to every subject of a story and to the people who help him out, he said. He keeps the notes in his bag everywhere he goes, and keeping up with people after their story aired has led to those people being sources for future stories. “The person you talk to on Monday who is a victim of something,” he said, “on Friday, they’re an expert on that.”
4. On handling emotional stories:
Pitts has reported on tragedy and devastation in the U.S. and abroad. He said that journalists are like ministers, in a way, because they go to people often at the worst times in their lives. To deal with the emotion of those moments, he reminds himself that he’s there for a specific purpose. “This is my job. There needs to be some sort of disconnect between me and what’s going on,” he said. “I have to be respectful of it — I have to make an attempt to understand it — but it’s not about me and my emotions.”
5. On dealing with catastrophe beyond what you can plan for:
When the first reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center came in, Pitts said, he was dispatched to cover the story because he happened to be in the New York City office on September 11. He was shocked by what he saw when he got to ground zero.
“I remember at one point having this moment of self pity, like ‘I’m not good enough to portray this moment — to give this moment what it deserves. I’m just not good enough as a journalist. I wish Ed Bradley, I wish somebody else was down here, not me.’ And I remember being so overwhelmed by it that I had to pause and pray.” He took a moment, he said, and then decided:
“I’m going to treat it like a house fire. I’ve covered a bunch of house fires.” House fires require detail and information and sensitivity, so if he thought of 9/11 that way, he could handle it more easily. Reflecting on that day later, he said, he learned an even more powerful lesson.
In the issue of People Magazine that came out after 9/11, there was a picture of a man who was on the phone and also watching television because his wife worked in one of the towers. In the photograph, Pitts said, you could see that the man was watching CBS News and Byron Pitts.
“For me, the powerful takeaway was in that moment, that man didn’t give a rat’s ass about my opinion, how I felt about what was going on,” Pitts said. “He didn’t need any pithy language, poetry. What he needed, deserved, wanted, and what was my responsibility to give him, was information.”
News University’s next Master Class is “The Art of the Interview: Master Class with Jacqui Banaszynski,” on Friday, May 15.
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