Wednesday, August 09, 2023

Getting It Right (Reporter's Notebook)

I published the first version of this essay 11 years ago this week.

If they were all added up. I wonder how many people I've interviewed in my career. How many people's stories I've collected. How many quotes I've selected.

You'd think it would all boil down to a formula, but it doesn't. Everyone is different; everyone's story is unique.

These days I do a few interviews in person each week, a few others by phone, and a few others by email. The author interviews I do for an ebook distributor start with a phone interview, followed by a Q&A in email.

That way there's no need to take notes or use a recorder, nor are there any worries about misquoting someone.

Still, even when the structure of an interview falls into a familiar pattern, because you are having a similar conversation to others about similar topics or ideas, the unique ways people see the world and tell their stories reshapes even familiar territory into new terrain.

That's one reason I like being a journalist, always finding out new things, always challenging my own assumptions. Being exposed to multiple perspectives on all kinds of things keeps me from falling into a rut of unexamined thinking, or descending into the echo chamber of group-think.

At least I hope it does.

While it might seem to some that the interviews I used to do of famous and prominent people for bigger publications like Rolling Stone or Salon about weighty topics might have been more important types of work than my current short blog profiles of startups or ebook authors.

I don't see it that way. A person's story is their story, whether they are powerful or unknown, whether the narrative seems complex or relatively simple.

There's nothing simple about a life -- any life.

It's an honor when someone lets you in on their dreams, their hopes, and their fears. To be entrusted at whatever level with the opportunity to write about someone else is a feeling I never get tired of, and try to never abuse.

As journalists, we tell other peoples' stories; often they will never do that for themselves.

Every keystroke is like the beating of a heart. The rhythm of life, emerging in words, joining other words into the narrative river.

Good or bad, nice or mean, dead or alive, these lives have mattered, and those of us who've witnessed them have an obligation to history to try and get these stories right.

Every time I post a new piece online, which averages about once a day, I hope that I get it right. Nothing bothers me more than hearing I made a mistake -- luckily these usually are minor and can be easily corrected, but they still bother me.

I'm not here to make mistakes. I'm here to get the story right.

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