The Blog of the Basic Reporting Class for Spring 2018: reporting skills

Showing posts with label reporting skills. Show all posts

Friday, February 09, 2018

A Journalist at Work

The famous Michael Lewis

Before I go to bed I send him a note. I’d planned to go watch the State of the Union address at the Capitol. I now think I’d rather watch Bannon watch the State of the Union address. Bannon is understandably gun-shy after the Wolff saga. He’d agreed to meet me for lunch so long as we spoke on background, and he had the right to vet any quotes. So I suggest safe terms: I tell him I’d like to record his play-by-play thoughts about Trump’s big speech, on the record -- though if he says anything he regrets in the moment he can just tell me, and I won’t use it.

Monday, January 25, 2016

I'd Call This a Nice Job of Reporting

From FiveThirtyEight

Last Friday, Washington, D.C.’s blizzard began sometime after the anti-abortion March for Life began, but before protesters reached the Supreme Court. The snow couldn’t stop a Franciscan friar, though. He kept on walking, barefoot, down the streets, singing hymns with other marchers. A long column of students, all in yellow, chanted a few choruses of “Pro-choice, that’s a lie! Babies never choose to die!” and then started up a call-and-response rosary with a bullhorn.

Not far away, I was cracking ice off of the tips of my touch-screen gloves and surveying protesters, trying to learn who had come to the march and what kind of post-post-Roe v. Wade world they wanted to build. I approached every fifth marcher I saw and interviewed 60 people over the four-hour event.¹ It’s not a sample I’d publish in an academic journal or anything, but it let me learn more about the movement than I could from staid news reports of how many people showed up.