Novel Idea… Writing after Reporting
As a journalist, I try to be objective. Non-Biased. Fair and balanced. But sometimes, before I go to report on a story, I’ve decided I already know what the story is about.
Most of the time this is perfectly innocuous. It’s impossible to pitch a story to an Executive Producer without having some idea of the story you are trying to tell. You can’t go to your boss and say, “Hey Boss. I’ve got this great story. It involves me taking thousands of dollars of recording equipment to Mexico. What do you think?”
The EP, understandably, would want to know more.
So when I went over the border into Mexico to report on what life is like for teens who live in border towns, I went in expecting a few things. I was sure this group of kids would be clamoring to get over the wall and into America. Clearly, everyone knows that a better life can only be attained in my land of the free and the home of the brave.
But when our group sat down with those six kids, my internal bias and stupidity was thrown in my face. These kids have an amazing pride for their country as well as an extreme desire to make their home better. They believe this can be achieved learning and living on their own soil.
And they have something a lot of American kids don’t have. Frankly they have something a lot of American adults don’t have, awareness of their world and perspective. While the American teens we talked to, were somewhat aware of the volatile issues surrounding the border, the Mexican kids could clearly talk about how their lives were affected by the political states of Mexico and America.
My week on the border was a lesson in actual reporting. This reporting fellowship puts us in an enviable situation where we don’t necessarily have to make the story we found fit into some preconceived notion of what the story was going to be. Our story actually gets to grow from the extensive reporting and interviewing that was done on the border. This is in contrast to the current atmosphere of the professional news business, which sometimes breeds writing the story before reporting on it.
Lucky us, we get to write the story after the reporting.
