Real Reporting

By Patrick Appel
Elizabeth Nolan Brown thinks that "the journalistic system has failed today’s young reporters than the other way around":

I got my first reporting job in 2005, at a small daily business paper. With only four reporters and two stories to write daily, we never left the office, doing things entirely via faxed press releases, emails and phone calls. Every now and then we got to leave to go to a press conference at the state capital or courthouse up the street, but this was frowned upon (”Can’t you just call and see if you can get a quote or a summary beforehand?”) because then we probably wouldn’t be back ’til 1 p.m. and completed stories were supposed to be to layout by then.