Turning experts into journalists, thanks to a ‘big cognitive shift’
“You hear people saying, ‘You can’t teach news judgment, it comes after years and years and years,’ ” Robert Steiner says.
“And I disagree. Some people will get it more than others, but you actually can teach news judgment.”
What Steiner is doing, as director of the Munk fellowship in global journalism at the University of Toronto, is teaching it not to students but to specialists — people who already have a career or profession or background in a particular area.
They might be a public-health doctor, or a China expert, or a criminology professor. When they wrap up their training eight months later, some will pursue reporting full-time, adding depth to the news industry with their expertise. But others will incorporate their new skills into their old careers, taking the craft of journalism down roads that Steiner hadn’t foreseen when the program launched in the fall of 2012.
Steiner figures most people can find a story or two in their field, something important and interesting that isn’t known to a broad audience. Then they run out of ideas.
“And that’s when the discipline of journalism really starts to become important,” he says. “Because one of the disciplines we’re teaching is how to find new ideas.
“What we’re doing is we’re saying, ‘Use your knowledge of your field to find stories that are surprising to you, and to be able to do what reporters do which is to find, always, week after week, year after year, find new stories.’ And that’s the discipline.”
The fellows spend some time learning the basics of entrepreneurial journalism (story structure, video, audio, photography, podcasting, data, ethics, legal issues), but the emphasis is on learning through constant practice to look at their specialty like a beat reporter.
It’s a skill that relies on training and practice.
“There’s a cognitive shift from thinking like a business person or a lawyer or an architect or a physician or scientist, whatever it is, to thinking like a journalist,” Steiner says.
“The big cognitive shift is, ‘Why do I care, and why does an audience that is not in your specialty care.’ That’s a big cognitive shift.”
And it stays with the fellows, even those who return to their original careers.
“It changes the way they do their other work. And often it’s because they now have an instinct because we’ve yelled it at them, politely you know, they can hear us saying to them, ‘Why would I care? Convince me that this is important.’ And ‘Why now, what’s new?’ and ‘Do you really know what you’re saying, do you really have anything to back this up?’”
Steiner slots Munk graduates into four categories:
Some have gone on to join news organizations, even when journalism jobs are so scarce. “We now have alumni working on staff at the Wall Street Journal, the Walrus, TVO, VICE and the FT (Financial Times).” Others become full-time freelancers or stringers.
A third category of graduates return to their profession but do a lot of journalism as well. One former fellow, Dr. Seema Yasmin, is a public-health specialist who now splits her time and salary between the University of Texas at Dallas and the Dallas Morning News. She was part of the newspaper team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news for coverage of the 2016 ambush of police in downtown Dallas.
The fourth category of graduates is the one that came as the biggest surprise to Steiner — the unexpected path. They “are not ostensibly journalists at all but are using these skills to do their jobs in a very different way,” he says, “to create a smarter public conversation around the work they’re doing.”
Richard Matern is an example. The head of research and communications for the Daily Bread Food Bank in Toron- to, Matern believes the social-policy sector has to find better ways to get its information out to the public, to communicate the issues behind hunger and other struggles. Daily Bread’s annual survey of food-bank clients, and the monthly reports it gets from food banks around the city, are full of untold stories.
Matern went into the 2013-14 Munk fellowship already understanding the power of data. What he learned was the journalistic instinct: If something stands out in the monthly data from food banks around the city, make a few calls, ask a few questions, see what surfaces. It’s the art of the “lede,” the top of a story, the information that is both important and interest- ing to the public.
He’s not writing the stories himself. But like a journalist, he’s conducting his research with a wider public audience in mind.
Late last year he took note of global trends like Syrian refugees and rising food prices. When he planned Daily Bread’s annual survey he added questions on those topics to find out how they’re affecting Toronto.
Then, when he sent out the 60 or so volunteers who gather the survey information, he coached them to be minijournalists.
“Now when volunteers are going out, we’re saying with the one-on-one interviews, get some context, get some information,” he says. “This isn’t just ticking off a box when you’re speaking with a person, you know, try to get their story and see what’s happening.
“So in a way you have 60, 70 mini-journalists going out and looking in-depth into a situation, and I guess what I’m realizing is how priceless that is and how important that is. I thought, this is a very unique in-depth opportunity to explore what is the state of poverty on the ground in Toronto.
“There are thousands of stories here. You just have more eyes, you’re looking at things in a different way.” wallace.mtl@gmail.com