Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Teams


When I think back over the past 50 years, one of the most notable changes in journalism was that reporters started to work in teams.

In school in the 60s, we were taught that the way it worked historically was that a series of great men -- and a few great women -- achieved journalistic success individually. Partnerships were rarely mentioned.

The big names were John Peter Zenger (1697-1746), Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1912), Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), Walter Cronkite (1916-2009) ... and more recently Barbara Walters (1929-2022) and Tom Wolfe (1931-2018).

There were investigative reporters too, mainly lone wolves like Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis in the early 20th century and then Jessica Mitford, Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein in our time. (These are the famous ones, there were many others.) They too mostly worked alone.

Some modern scholars credit the Center for Investigative Reporting and Mother Jones for establishing the non-profit model of investigative journalism. (Note: Investigative Reporters and Editors deserves major credit as well.)

But concentrating on those two organizations, CIR and MoJo, which encapsulated so much of my own career, what's true is that we produced our muckraking reports in teams(*) much more than as individuals. Maybe this was a Baby Boomer thing; after all, we were such a huge generation numerically that we rarely did anything in life completely alone.

(*) As of earlier this year, 2024, CIR and Mother Jones have merged into a single team.

Woodward & Bernstein are a tad older than our generation, but they certainly are the most famous co-authors in American journalism history. But they didn’t work together very long, given the length of their careers.

Personally, I have published with many co-authors, both because I love working with collaborators and because we all uniquely bring different qualities to the partnership.

Some of us specialize in interviews, some in documents, some as investigators, some as writers or story-tellers. But what can be most valuable in a team is the ability to bring an unusual perspective on the story.

It’s not the kind of working style that suits every temperament. People who get too easily frustrated and who give up easily tend to drop off teams. People who worry more about process than results rarely work out in these kinds of projects. Egos can all too easily rear their ugly heads; competing egos are poisonous.

But for those of us who do stick it out, team stories yield a large percentage of the best journalism out there today.

(NOTE: I published the earliest version of this essay four years ago.)

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