Sara PeachSara Peach
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Photo by StefZ. Used under a Creative Commons license.
One of the biggest challenges I'm facing as a journalist right now is the threat that my stories will eat each other alive.
At Powering A Nation, our team has a wide range of journalism skills, including photography, writing, programming and graphic design.
This range of skills means we can choose the best medium to tell each story.
But I'm getting into trouble now because like most of my team members, I'm using more than one medium - text and video - to tell what's really a single story.
The story is about the members of an Ohio community who live within 15 miles of four coal-fired power plants. A fifth proposed plant is scheduled to break ground late this year or in early 2010.
I originally planned to create a video about the emotional story of one activist's fight to stop the fifth plant. I'd use text to introduce other community member's viewpoints and to provide an analysis of the situation.
But I soon discovered that every community member I met had an emotional story to tell. I knew that my audience would connect with hearing their voices and seeing their faces.
So I started incorporating more and more of the "meat" of the story, as it were, into the video.
Not wanting to duplicate the video, I reduced the text piece to the bones. I deleted most of my favorite quotes. As a result, the text became a dry explanation of what we know about the costs and benefits of power plants to the Ohio community.
This analysis is useful, but it doesn't sing the way my other written stories have. How could it? The real flesh of it has been gobbled up by the video!
How would you deal with this problem?
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Some energy issues are so controversial that people can’t even agree on the words used to talk about them.
Chris Carmichael and I noticed during a recent trip to Ohio that supporters of a new electricity-generating plant in Meigs County call it a “power house.” Opponents call it a “coal plant” or a “coal-fired power plant.” Similarly, a West Virginia miner’s “surface mine” is an environmental activist’s “mountain-top removal site.”
I’m convinced that each group’s word choice is an important piece of the larger turf war. Just as a fence indicates the boundary of a suburban yard, people are using words to scratch rhetorical boundaries at the edges of their communities. Whether a person talks about “mountain-top removal” or “surface mining” is a signal of that person’s larger way of thinking about how America should produce energy.
This turf-scratching leaves journalists in a tough spot, because sometimes there is no neutral way to talk about an issue.
My coworkers and I had a debate in a recent editorial meeting about whether we should use the term “climate change” or “global warming” in our stories. On one hand, “climate change” is the term used most often by scientists to describe what is happening as people increase greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Yet many activists use “global warming,” which is probably the term best understood by the American public.
Making matters even more complicated, Republican pollster Frank Luntz has recommended that opponents of greenhouse-gas regulations use the words “climate change” because it sounds less scary than “global warming”:
It’s time for us to start talking about “climate change” instead of global warming...As one focus group participant noted, climate change “sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.” While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge. (From page 12 of this Luntz memo, a PDF.)
So when journalists talk about the issue, either word choice is a loaded one.
In our editorial meeting, our team ultimately decided to use “climate change” because it’s the most scientifically accurate term. But we haven’t made any decisions about the words pairs I mentioned at the beginning of the post.
What do you think we should do to make the best word choices?
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Sara Peach filming community activist Elisa Young near Racine, Ohio. Photo by Chris Carmichael.
One of the strangest things about being a journalist is watching people grow anxious when I point a camera at them.
During reporting in Meigs County, Ohio, last week, Chris Carmichael and I talked to quite a few nervous people. One woman who had never been interviewed on camera before told us she was both nervous and exhilarated. Nearly everyone brought a friend or family member to the interview, probably in some cases as a confidence-booster.
But what our interviewees most likely didn’t realize was that Chris and I were apprehensive, too. Since one of the goals of this Web site is to make journalism more transparent, I thought I’d share the five things I worry about most as a journalist.
5. Is this thing on?
Technical problems can sink an interview. I’m always thinking about whether the microphone is working correctly, if the lighting’s good and if I have a spare battery. Nothing’s worse than having to return to a source to say that I blew it.
4. Am I safe?
When I was growing up, I sold Girl Scout cookies door-to-door. My troop leaders taught me never to enter a customer’s house, for safety reasons. But now that I’m a journalist, my job is to talk to strangers, often alone in their homes. I haven’t had a safety problem yet, but it’s something I think about.
3. Am I missing something big?
The less I know about the issue I’m reporting on, the easier it is for me to be led astray. For that reason, I feel more confident working on stories about energy and the environment because I have a degree in environmental studies. Still, there is no way for me to know everything, and I’m always wondering if I’m overlooking an important angle.
2. Will anyone talk to me before my deadline?
I always fear that no one will agree to answer my nosy questions, or worse, that an important source will back out at the last minute. Without a source, I have no story.
1. Am I getting it right?
Journalists have a reputation for getting the facts wrong. I’ve been horribly misquoted before and read plenty of stories with inaccurate information. Like most journalists, I want to do better. Fortunately, my audience can help. If you spot something wrong, I want to hear from you. It’s the best way to make sure I get it right the next time.
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Welcome to an experiment.
This summer, I’m working with a team of reporters to develop new ways of telling stories online. The project, which is funded by the Carnegie and Knight Foundations, involves 12 journalism students and recent graduates based at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The news about the journalism industry is often dire. The rise of the Internet has contributed to a death spiral in traditional media as classified advertising and other revenue streams have evaporated. But the Internet also offers opportunities for experimenting in new and better ways of practicing journalism.
Since January, our team has been thinking about how we can best use the tools of the Internet for journalism. How can we involve our audience? How can we be more transparent? How can audio, video, 3-D graphics and Facebook applications expand the reach and power of our stories - or become the stories themselves?
We still don’t have all the answers. But as we carry out this experiment, we’ll be blogging about our experiences, including our successes and failures.
Meanwhile, we’d love to hear from you. What’s working for you? What could we do better? Let us know by commenting or sending an e-mail to
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
. We welcome you as a fellow experimenter in the journalism of the future.
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