APRIL 12, 2018 • THE PORT TIMES RECORD • PAGE A23
OPINION
Confessions of a detested and detestable journalist
H
ello, my name is Dan and I’m a ... journalist. It’s been a few days since my last meeting and a lot has happened since then. For starters, I’ve decided to hate myself. I’m coming to grips with the idea that, as a journalist, I am detested and detestable. I ask questions. All the time. Just ask my wife and kids, although they’re too annoyed with my questions to entertain yours. I have this insane urge to understand and appreciate the By Daniel Dunaief nuance of a word or phrase. I even have a dictionary. Didn’t we burn those long ago? Aren’t we supposed to look for the underlined red words in a document?
D. None of the above
My editors and I also change my words. What you see doesn’t just leap from my fingers onto the page. How are you supposed to know what I’m thinking if I let my ideas develop before shouting them at you? I don’t have a specific character limit. Oh, and I only use hashtags when I’m pushing the button on my phone. Sacrebleu! And I write foreign phrases like “sacrebleu” to express my surprise. Additionally, I absolutely adore alliteration. I can’t help smiling when I think about the movie “Broadcast News.” I know, I know, we’re supposed to hate everything with the word “news” in it, but I grin when I hear Albert Brooks asking, “Pretty peppy party, isn’t it, pal?” I frequently read. Sometimes, I’ll be in a room with a television and I’ll have a book or a, gasp, newspaper in my hands with the TV off. How am I supposed to relate to everyone when I’m not watching TV? And deadlines? They’re so real for
me that I sometimes don’t talk to my wife and kids just before they arrive. I used to work for Bloomberg News — the fastest twitch environment I’d ever experienced. An editor once followed me into the bathroom to find out how long I would be in there because I had a story to write. When I was on deadline at Bloomberg, particularly around earnings season, I would give my wife all of five seconds to share whatever she needed to communicate before I raced to the next story. Oh, and I sometimes make mistakes. That’s horrific, especially when I have to explain how I could have erred. I used to have to write letters reviewing how I blundered; I called them the “I suck because ...” letters. I periodically imagined weaseling my way out of trouble by claiming how tired I was from getting up at 4 a.m. when I learned of a story I’d missed in Europe. That, however, would never fly, because a mistake has no defense; it requires a correction. I also use semi-
colons and colons, which have nothing to do with my bathroom habits. Sure, there are times when someone claimed I made a mistake when, in fact, the mistake was not agreeing with their opinion. That’s not a mistake — a difference of opinion. But, hey, that’s another reason to hate me. I think about whether something is an opinion or a fact. An opinion lives in a realm where people need to repeat it to make sure everyone agrees. A fact can and should stand on its own. It’s hard, when we’re all human, to ignore the pleas of people in power who want journalists and their stories to go away. One of my journalism professors said he tried to limit his friendships so they wouldn’t prevent him from doing his job. That’s tough because I enjoy interacting, even with people who don’t share the same viewpoint. But, wait, I hate that because, ultimately, I’m loathsome and detestable.
Celebrating our 42nd anniversary as Facebook flounders
R
ecently I received a voicemail message asking me if we were planning to cover fairly a contentious issue currently in the community. The speaker cared deeply about one side, and said he understood that we had friends on the other side of the issue. As a result of those ties, were we going to favor them or, at the least, bury the story in the back of the paper where no one would read it? Forty-two years ago this week, a handful of us started The Village Times in a tiny By Leah S. Dunaief office but with great ambition. We promised to serve the community according to “the highest ideals of a free press.” It was 1976, the bicentennial year. We were well aware of the singular role the press played in the
Between you and me
American Revolution and the sanctity with which the Founding Fathers viewed the press. Today, we acknowledge other forms of free speech and press by putting them all together and calling them “media.” But the press, specifically the printed word on newsprint, will always be where my heart is in this business, no matter that we now have a website, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a place on YouTube and are called TBR News Media. We’ve gone viral on the internet, with over 17 million views for our story and video dealing with school safety in Rocky Point, and to have that kind of reach certainly impresses me. Nonetheless the printed story, the elegance of crafting exactly the right words to describe a scene or an issue or emotion, laid out efficiently and attractively, and most especially truthfully and fairly on a page, with pictures to drive home the information, gives me enormous professional satisfaction. Words as precision tools are not respected the same way on the more frenetic media. Nor are truth and facts always respected there. Because there is
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little or no vetting, some people take advantage of the lawlessness to write the most astonishing things, slanted or even untrue as they may be, and others willingly believe what they read. Right now, Facebook, which was started in 2004, is facing the consequences of publishing unmonitored content presented as news or advertising, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg tries to answer hard questions put to him by the U.S. Congress. Not to revel in another media’s troubles, but everything printed in a newspaper is vetted, even the ads, the sources of the ads and, to the extent possible for facts, the letters. That does not mean everything you might read in our papers is correct. We can and do make mistakes. But those are, or should be, immediately acknowledged and corrected in the next edition. Nor are we without bias, however hard we try. But if we try for a truthful and balanced presentation in every story that we print, to a large extent we can succeed. We reserve our opinions for the opinion pages. At least, so I believe. With such a long track record, I was quite sur-
EDITOR AND PUBLISHER Leah S. Dunaief GENERAL MANAGER Johness Kuisel MANAGING EDITOR Desirée Keegan EDITOR Alex Petroski
LEISURE EDITOR Heidi Sutton SPORTS EDITOR Desirée Keegan ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Kathryn Mandracchia DIR. OF MEDIA PRODUCTIONS Michael Tessler
prised to hear that question on my voicemail. The caller left his number, and I was able to return his phone call. We had a heart-to-heart talk, and that, along with the story we wrote, I trust, persuaded him that we had dealt with the matter fairly. If he were trying to encourage us to lean in his direction on the issue, his strategy clearly didn’t work. Here are some of the other things newspapers don’t do. We don’t compile personal information about our readers and then sell that information to potential advertisers. We don’t even sell the names and addresses of our subscribers, although we have been asked a number of times. Your privacy is not for our profit. We don’t write stories about businesses in order to get their advertising. Our newspapers have never been hacked. But I wouldn’t mind having a couple of their billions. And forgive my pride if I suggest that there is some kind of old-fashioned honor that underpins a good newspaper serving its community. That’s not a sentiment I associate with the internet.
ART AND PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Beth Heller Mason INTERNET STRATEGY DIRECTOR Rob Alfano CLASSIFIEDS DIRECTOR Ellen Segal
BUSINESS MANAGER Sandi Gross CREDIT MANAGER Diane Wattecamps CIRCULATION MANAGER Courtney Biondo