The geometry of journalism

It was a few weeks into my reporting class in a small international university in Bratislava, Slovakia, and time for my coaching session with Martina, who gingerly approached. She’s Czech, bright, and a good, solid reporter who fails to put her lead at the top of her story; she saves it for the end like a term-paper conclusion.

Martina sat, crumpled and waiting. I scrambled for yet another way of explaining that her lead is once again at the end.

I drew a large rectangle. This represents your story, I said. Inside the rectangle I drew a stack of five squares. These squares are the elements you used in your story. I drew a line from the squares and labeled each. She nodded. What does each of these elements do for your story? She spoke softly of sources and quotes and stories having many sides. And what does your conclusion do for your story? “It tells readers what I know after I have talked to my sources,” she said. “It gives them the whole picture.”

Exactly. One of your jobs is to take the pieces of information and braid them for readers to give the whole picture. Instead of waiting, tell readers right away.

She furrowed her brow. Martina, I said, think about structuring your story like this: I turned the paper upside down. The conclusion – her lead – crowned the squares.

She scrutinized the crude geometry. She took the paper and turned it right side up to its original pattern. Then she turned it upside down, staring with that glazed, faraway look that signals concentration. She broke into a wide grin and looked up at me. Yes, yes, she said. This I understand. This I understand.

That was what I had hoped to hear.

Martina was one of my 17 students. They came from Kazakhstan, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic. They enrolled for 10 months to learn professional journalism from American professors.

Of the profession’s standard six-pack of questions, the one I most wrestled with was the H: How do I teach them to see journalism in a new way?

I spent two years in Slovakia as a Knight International Press Fellow, helping create and teach a residential, master’s-level journalism program. We spoke and worked in English; our curriculum modeled professionally oriented J-school programs in the U.S. Teaching journalism interactively was a radical approach for these students. In their countries, J-school curriculum is bloated with theory. It was (and still is in many countries in that region) possible to graduate without ever writing an originally reported story, without ever having a professor bark at you for turning in lousy copy.

“I am your editor, you are my reporters,” I told them that spring day. They looked at me as if I’d asked them to shave their heads. Marius, a young Romanian reporter, raised his hand. “Excuse me please, professor, but the way you tell us to write articles is up in the sky for me.”

I collected their reporting assignments the following week. They were rife with grammar contortions, malapropisms, spelling errors that would incite copy editors. Those weren’t my main concerns, as the students would return to their countries, their languages, their syntax, their deeper vocabularies. Instead, I spelunked: addressing the logic, the depth of reporting, the balance, and the organization of information. Explaining these aspects vexes me; it’s like parsing fog.

Most journalism professors I know grapple with teaching these macro skills, but they usually do so on common ground with their students. Journalism is said to be a culture’s conversation with itself. If we share a culture, we have a shared idea about the conversation’s form and content. But in Slovakia, I faced students who grew up knowing journalism as fiction fabricated by and for those in power. Fact checking? Public trust? Headlines that match stories? “The only thing true in our newspapers,” a Georgian student said, “were the obituaries.”

Laura Kelly, who taught journalism in Eastern Europe for seven years, spent two years as Journalism and Mass Communication department chair at the American University in Bulgaria. She works in the region as a media trainer.