Joe Shapiro

Transcript

1. Source(s) of Interest/Early Experiences

I knew from the time I was a kid that I wanted to be a journalist. I grew up in Washington. Maybe that was it. There was a lot of history and politics, interesting things going on. I grew up reading good newspapers with The Washington Post, The Washington Star. I had a cousin who was a journalist, and I thought it was an amazing job that he got to go write about basketball games and cover amazing things -- write about politics, and it just seemed like a fun thing to do. So, really, probably from the time I was in elementary school, I knew I wanted to be a journalist. I went to college with that goal, but I went to a small college, Carleton College, in Northfield, Minnesota -- 1,400 students, no journalism department. So, I didn’t go to major in journalism, and I actually think it’s a good idea not to major in journalism -- to get -- I got a broad liberal arts background and worked on the newspaper at the school. But it wasn’t much of a newspaper. I didn’t really have much journalism experience. Then I did go to graduate school in journalism at Columbia University, and I got a master’s degree in journalism there. But even then, journalism is not really something you can teach; it’s hard to teach. I really learned it when I got my, right, when I got my first job. There weren’t that many internships when I was in school. There were not as many as there are today. And I tried a few places. I didn’t get one; um, that’s one reason why I ended up going to journalism school because I didn’t have that avenue of doing internships. I didn’t really have any real journalism experience. Actually, after I graduated from college, between my senior year in college and starting graduate school, I helped a friend of mine, uh, start a weekly newspaper in a little town in Iowa -- a town of about 1,200 people. And, I did some writing, but mostly we were selling ads and setting the type and distributing the newspaper. But that gave me some feel for it. I was on my high school paper. I did some writing on the college paper. I started a magazine in college, so a lot of things that were related to writing.

2. Internship/Work History

A. Earliest Jobs

I got out of graduate school in 1976, and there was a recession going on, and there weren’t many jobs in journalism. There were about 130 people, 120 people, in my journalism class, and we only had about two newspapers that came to recruit. And one of them came, and about 60 of my classmates applied for this one job they had, and I got it. And so, at graduation, I am one of the only kids in the class with a job. Well, I’m thinking that was easy, and this isn’t a very good job, and I’ll do better. So I turned it down and spent the entire summer writing letters to newspapers and not even getting a nibble, not even getting an interview. And eventually I found out about a job in Rome, Italy, on an English language newspaper where they were hiring reporters, and I applied, and I got a job that paid $60 a week, but I got to be in Italy, and I did that for a year and a-half, and that was great. I went from Rome, Italy, to, uh, Tupelo, Mississippi. Actually, in Rome I had a couple of jobs. I worked for this English language newspaper that’s since folded, and then I worked for something called the Religious News Service covering the Vatican. I did that for several months. I tried to free-lance and wasn’t very successful. So I gave up, and I came back to the United States, and I started applying for jobs, and it took a few months, and eventually I landed a job in the Tupelo, Mississippi Bureau of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, so I was a one-person bureau covering a large part northeast Mississippi, including, uh, Oxford, William Faulkner country, to Tupelo, which was Elvis Presley’s birthplace.

B. Tupelo Story that launched career

Well, I actually ended up in Tupelo at an interesting time. The week I arrived, um, the local police department -- two cops had been found--held responsible for the beating of a Black man that they had arrested, and police brutality was fairly common there. But it was extremely uncommon that a court would find police responsible for police brutality. It actually was the place where the Ku Klux Klan started up again in the, uh, -- this was 1978, after being quiet for years. They started up again in Tupelo. And I happened to be there and wrote about it, and a lot of the writing I did for this paper in Memphis, for the Mississippi edition of the paper in Memphis, an edition that few people saw, nevertheless, it got a lot of attention nationally, and that story grew, and it was actually a fascinating story because here it was a decade after the Civil Rights movement, but a lot of the same issues played out in this town in Mississippi. Well, you’re asking if it got me my next job; it sort of forced me into my next job because the story was like -- I ended up getting arrested on some false charges. I was annoying the police department with my writing about the police brutality and then the problems in the police department, and, at a Ku Klux Klan rally, I was arrested and charged with inciting a riot. Anyway, that was a long story, so anyway, it meant that I had no choice but to leave Tupelo, and I ended up covering City Hall for the paper in Memphis.

C. Rest of Job History and influence of DPN

I was working in the Tupelo Bureau of the Memphis newspaper, so they just brought me into Memphis, and I worked there. That was a Scripps-Howard newspaper; a couple of years later they sent me to Washington, which is what I wanted to do. And I worked in the Washington Bureau of the Scripps-Howard news service. They suggested that -- I ended up working as a regional reporter for two small newspapers and then eventually went to work in the -- for the news service. I did that for a few years, and then a job opened at U.S. News and World Report. That was in 1982, and I’ve been here ever since. And then I was hired by U.S. News to cover Congress; I did that for a couple of years. Then I covered the White House for a couple of years. Then I went back to Italy as the Rome Bureau Chief for a while. I came back to Washington, and I’ve been covering social policy issues for over a decade, and now I write about social policy, particularly about health care -- aging, disability issues. But I came back to Washington in 197_ -- in 1987; I was looking for some things to write about. I started writing about social policy issues. I sort of fell into writing about disability issues. One of the first things that got me going was, in, uh—in 1988, I was assigned to cover the Gallaudet student protest -- DPN. So that, and I had done a story earlier about the disability civil rights movement that was starting, and that led to my taking a year off to look at disability issues and issues of deaf culture, and I ended up writing a book called No Pity about the whole disability rights movement. [Interviewer: "Do you think DPN" was a spur?”] Absolutely, DPN [Deaf President Now] was an important spur for educating Americans that – about--these issues. They’d never heard a group of people with a disability talking about their issues in terms of being a civil rights issue, using a civil rights model. And that educated Americans. That, I think, lead the way, then, for this larger coalition of disabled people to pass the Americans With Disabilities Act.

3. Differences among Kinds of Journalism/Communication Fields

Yeah, but when I was in journalism school, I actually got interested in broadcasts. But, my interest had always been pretty much print. At Columbia, the argument was that journalism is journalism; you take the same skills no matter what the medium. You use the same skills -- that the building blocks are the same. That it -- and they didn’t really, uh, distinguish at that time between the different media. There are differences in the -- there are differences in the technology ... I guess the theory was that you can learn those things. That the basic skills of reporting and editing, and how you approach a news story ...

4. What it takes to Produce a Good Story

I think the hardest part of creating a story is to take an idea and present it in a way that’s different, thoughtful, imaginative, in a way that really explains things in smart, accurate ways, but maybe in ways that readers aren’t traditionally getting. We talk about pack journalism: the idea that often journalists will cover the same things, say it the same way, do the conventional wisdom. I’ve had fun at U.S. News writing pieces that sort of pierced the conventional wisdom, that try to show people new things and new ways. That’s one thing that attracted me to writing about disability issues because the disability community has a very different perspective on things, on presenting what it means to have a disability or to be deaf, to get away from those images of feeling pity for somebody with a disability or seeing them as an inspirational figure. It was just a matter of being a listener and listening to what people with disabilities say. But then to present it in the context that they’re talking about, not in this context that journalists often have that there are certain ways of writing about disabilities. I think that’s hard because it takes more time, more ... -- you can’t just sort of go in and think you’re going to understand something right away. You really have to dig in and listen a lot and do a lot of reporting and lot of thinking about it. It depends on the story. But I spent a lot of the time doing the gathering and the thinking about it, and it may be that I am doing a lot of reporting for something that I won’t write, but maybe in the future it will.

5. Past and Current Pressures, Conditions, Realities:

The Internet Influence: Infoedutainment and the Integration of Media

(1). The Role of Technology in the Production of News

I’m wary about making predictions. I know the managing editor of The Washington Post sent a memo out to the staff last year talking about how we were going to -- the journalists were going to-- provide all sorts of content, and that, in the future, we’ll wear hats with cameras in them while we do an interview, and we’ll write up our story, and then we’ll put the video on the web. And actually there are some places that are already doing this where they want the reporters to be competent in lots of different ways of gathering information. The Chicago Tribune is doing that where they’re combining a lot of the television and the print. So, I don’t know how much of that we’ll see. It is, I think, important to be flexible and to have experience in a lot of different media and be open to that. But I think there always will be a place for just print -- just magazines -- newspapers.

(2) Blurring of News Reporting and Entertainment

Well, that is a disturbing trend in journalism -- this idea that there’s this blurring of the lines between news reporting and providing entertainment, but, uh, at the same time that we have had the rise of things like “Entertainment Tonight,” we’ve also had the rise of serious shows like “Nightline” or the NPR shows, so I think there seems to be both, and I’m not worried about this. One of my former editors put it nicely. He said that the – he said that what journalists need to do is take what’s important and make it interesting. Too often, we take what’s interesting and make it important.

Infoedutainment, Accuracy, and Consumer vs. Media Responsibilities

(1). No Need for More Errors, yet a Need for More Discerning Readers

Are there more errors? Um. You know, I’m not sure if there are more; there don’t have to be more. Even with time pressure--and there’s always been some time pressure on people--that’s not an excuse for not being accurate, for not being careful. If you don’t know something, then you don’t put it on. You have to be sure. I mean clearly there are these web sites, the Matt Drudges who are sort of working in gossip and just putting things out there. There is this argument that you just put it out there, and you let the reader decide. But I don’t see that as the role of journalism. Some people argue that that’s what we should do. We should, uh, -- that we already put a filter on things, that we already put our own perspectives or our own ideas in the stories that we choose and the way we write them. And maybe readers are going to have to be more discerning, and they probably are much more so than they were a generation ago. They probably are much more sophisticated readers. So I guess readers will have to make some more decisions and will have to do some of the filtering themselves.

(2). Economic pressures

There are other pressures on publications today to make money. There is a dispersal of -- there are so many different kinds of places to get information -- so many places advertisers can go. When I first started at U.S. News, this was a national magazine, and our competition for ads tended to be Time and Newsweek. Now, we have competition from U.S.A. Today, The New York Times national edition--those are national publications that have some of the same audience. And then some of the web sites that are popping out, uh, television, the expansion of cable television--there are many more places where advertisers can go. And that does create some problems for publications, and I think it’s why you see some of the pressure on publications, the problems the Los Angeles Times fell into when they came up with this idea to share some of the revenues with the Staple Center, this new arena that opened up in Los Angeles. They did a magazine--a special magazine--devoted to it, collected special advertising, shared it with this group that they were supposed to be writing about. So there are a lot of pressures on the advertising side of our publication and all publications. And it’s the advertising more than our subscriptions really that give us the money that allow us to operate.

6. Deaf People in Journalism: Barriers and Opportunities

(1) Going the extra mile to get the job; pioneering deaf journalists breaking down barriers

I think the traditional thing to do is to say is, if you try hard enough, if you practice hard enough, anything’s possible. But for a deaf person who is trying to get into journalism, we know it’s going to be extra difficult. There are going to be a lot of employers who are going to say, "This won’t work out." But there are some pioneers who are changing that. I talked to Karen Meyer, who’s a deaf woman, who’s a journalist for WLS, a television station in Chicago, and she does these bi-weekly reports, usually on disability subjects, and she does the reporting, and the writing, and she’s the on-air journalist delivering the news, and she’s speaking it, and they run captions on her pieces, and she’s done some wonderful pieces. I have met her at the--Easter Seals has an annual award for reporting on disability issues--and she’s won a number of times. I met her there. I met her in Chicago. Actually I think she did an article when my book came out. So there are people like that who are sort of breaking down some of these barriers. I have another friend, a journalist name Kathy Wolf who is blind, who has been pretty successful at writing, usually commentary for op-ed pages of big newspapers around the country, The Washington Post, The Milwaukee Journal, The Miami Herald; she’s been plugging away, and she’s found some editors who are willing to give her a shot, and she builds on one success at a time. A person who’s deaf or any person with a disability has to convince an editor what they can do and how they do it, and what accommodations -- hopefully, simple accommodations-- they need.

(2) Internet Possibilities and What to Do to Get a Chance at a Job

I think the Internet is opening up all sorts of possibilities for journalists. There -- this is a job market unlike any in my lifetime that I can remember for young journalists. There are all sorts of possibilities on the web because what are these Internet sites doing? They’re providing information, and journalists have skills that are sorely needed at these web sites. There are all sorts of these sites that are presenting news and information. There are a couple -- there are several now for people with disabilities. I mentioned Kathy Wolf; she writes for one called Half the Planet.com. She does movie reviews and book reviews and commentary. There’s another one called "Can Do." There are some others coming on the market. It’s partly the responsibility of the person who’s deaf to explain to that editor who may not know any deaf people, who may not know how that person can do a job in a newsroom, and so that person has to say, "Well, I think I can" -- it has to be realistic and have to say, "I can do this and that,” or, “With this help or accommodation, I can do x, y, and z, and I want to do this,” or “Would you let me try this?" It helps to have clips -- to have stories you’ve written. So often, starting out freelancing, if you’ve got a good story that can – that will get an editor’s attention. If they see something you have done that’s smart and creative and original and well written, it doesn’t matter if it’s in some local free newspaper.