When she was a fellow for Poynter this summer, Gurman Bhatia emerged from Roy Peter Clark’s office one day looking very excited. And she was, she told me then, because she’d just watched Poynter’s senior scholar for reporting, writing and editing compose a tweet.
His first pass at the tweet went like this: “My writing improved when I learned the difference between reports and stories.”
“He then stopped for a moment and said ‘Hmmm… I have 17 characters left,'” Bhatia remembers. “He then added ‘dramatically,’ transforming the sentence to ‘My writing improved dramatically when I learned the difference between reports and stories.’ In that moment I realized that I might understand algorithms and ‘social media strategies,’ but Roy reminded me of the weight you can add with each character.”
On Tuesday, I wrote about Gurman and other young colleagues who have a lot to offer our newsrooms. But as Roy demonstrated through his masterfully crafted tweet, veterans have more than a thing or two to teach young journalists, too.
1. They’ve mastered the stuff you’re still learning. “Us youngsters might be more up to date with social networks and new technology, but none of that matters without a solid understanding of writing, reporting, verification, ethics and so on,” said Poynter’s Katie Hawkins-Gaar. “If you can combine the power of digital innovation with solid journalism, then you’ll be unstoppable.”
2. They probably wrote that story already. Veterans usually know the people, institutions and situations you’re writing about, too. Vets can offer history, context and push for details you may initially miss.
“When Ari Goldman, my professor at the Columbia Journalism School, sent me for my first assignment, I came back with a notebook with full pages,” Bhatia said. “One of the places I visited for the story was a Bangladeshi restaurant. Goldman’s second question was – how many seats are there in the restaurant? I did not know an answer to that. I went back and spent five minutes just noting my surroundings. That is now a part of my practice.”
That experience can also counterbalance younger employees in the newsroom.
“I mean, the vets have definitely seen so much more than the newbies,” said News University’s Ren LaForme. “They have a breadth of knowledge that balances out younger employees’ willingness to blow everything up and start fresh. The ‘question everything’ approach doesn’t really work if ​everything needs to be changed, right?”
3. They know who not to get stuck with in the elevator. “Veterans know how to navigate the newsroom better than most young reporters coming into the job because they’ve had years to learn the rhythms of professional journalism,” Poynter’s Ben Mullin told me. “They are already acclimated to the sensitive nuances of newsroom politics, and they’re aware of the unspoken rules that govern the workplace. By listening to newsroom veterans, you can learn how to be a great colleague — which is just as important as being an excellent writer or reporter.”
Hawkins-Gaar agreed.
“Some of the most important knowledge in any workplace comes from time and experience,” she said. “Knowing how to communicate with a particular coworker or what time of day is best to approach a certain editor with an idea can be invaluable information. Longtime employees are a wonderful resource when it comes to navigating office politics.”
4. Again, diversity. As with the benefits of working with people who are just starting out, people who’ve been at it for awhile bring their life experiences with them, too. They can also serve as a reminder for younger journalists that there is life outside of journalism.
“When you get your first journalism job, it’s easy to behave as if your 9-to-5 is really a 7-to-9, a calling that comes before ‘trivial’ things like sleep, nutrition and friends,” Mullin said. “But watching how newsroom veterans balance their work with serious commitments like children, husbands and wives is a reminder that the entire world isn’t concentrated in your newsroom. Veterans can be an instructive model for establishing healthy work-life boundaries that give you permission to care for yourself and others.”
5. They will show you what resilience means. When I began writing for the St. Louis Beacon, one thing I knew about the majority of my colleagues was that they’d taken early buyouts from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and then started an online nonprofit news site. These were people who’d spent their careers reporting on and in St. Louis. And when the time came to move on from their print home, they took a huge risk and embraced digital journalism. Five years later, they did it again by merging with St. Louis Public Radio. People assume veteran journalists are slow to change, but after working with many of them and covering the continual slog of layoffs and buyouts, I’m not sure that’s accurate. Young journalists are adaptive by nature. Anyone who has been in this profession for awhile is most likely resilient out of necessity.
