On Journalism

I want to be this kind of journalist. I'll never be this kind of journalist.

So, I’m not going to work at the Oregon Daily Emerald next year.

I’d be lying if I said that working at the Emerald has come into conflict with my lifetime goal of being universally liked by everyone, forever. To be honest, I never expected to get a lot of hate mail to begin with, being as I generally advocated moderation, but apparently the University of Oregon has a pretty strong “fuck moderation” movement going on. It could also be because my fact checking was, at times, spotty, which is apparently not okay in journalism. My bad!

The problem with writing about campus life is that you’re basically shitting in your own pool every week. A guy who writes about international politics isn’t quite as much in the hot seat, because if he says Kim Jong Il is a prick he isn’t going to get a nasty letter about it from the man in the tracksuit himself. However, when I write that I think the Pacifica Forum is a hate group, their collective response is to fill up the comments section after my article with posts about how they’re not a hate group and how much they hate me (and also, for old time’s sake, the Jews).

What I found out pretty quickly was that the stakes in this game are significantly higher than I had initially expected. When I applied at the Daily Emerald, I turned in a couple of old blogs of mine, my reasoning being that they’d discern that I generally wrote opinionless drivel and would hire me if that’s what they were looking for. So I guess I was sort of surprised when I found out that I had to come up with a new opinion every week in my job as an opinion writer.

So, yeah, that was definitely my first mistake – applying for a job I felt unqualified for. I would recommend against that one in the future, kids.

I’m used to writing a blog that something like 90 people read, most of whom are my friends, relatives, or students at my old high school. If I make a generalization on here about where a person can and can’t carry a gun that is (charitably speaking) inaccurate, my uncle might have the wherewithal to do the research and point out the error, but that’s about the end of it. When I did that very thing in the Emerald, I drew the ire of people from across the campus and the country and got a royal bitch slap from the drunken libertarians down at the Oregon Commentator.* All because I was blatantly wrong about one fact.

*If any of the Commentator folks are reading this, it’s been a real honor pissing you guys off this year. Your blog is top drawer and your print edition makes excellent use of that picture of the guy with puke coming out his nose.

That’s just the thing though – when you’re writing for a paper, you can’t be blatantly wrong about one fact. It’s not okay, and then you aren’t a good journalist, which looks pretty bad when you’re a journalism major. Of course, I’ve never wanted to be a journalist, so it’s okay for me to be bad at it – but as a matter of common courtesy, I should probably quit stinking up a legitimate newspaper with my attempts at comedy. I suppose if there was a comedy newspaper on campus I could write for that, but unfortunately all we’ve got is The Comic Press, which has about as professional a layout as my middle school paper but with considerably less talented writers.

It’s not that I don’t want to be factual (although I do want to write fiction, which is the opposite of fact), it’s just that I would rather be factual on my terms. At the Emerald I had to find something pertaining to campus life every week that I had an opinion on, whether I was particularly interested in it or not, and then write about it. The more I did it, the less I liked it, and the less effort I wanted to put into it, and it’s never a good idea to cut corners on fact checking when you’re putting your writing out in front of a pretty damn large community full of many devoted gun owners. If I’m going to write something and toss it out to the wolves like that, I want to be writing about something I care about, something that I’ll want to do meticulous work on, something that I have time to seriously refine. Yes, I imagine one day I’ll author quite the treatise on why they shouldn’t have cancelled Firefly.

I’m going to miss the Emerald. The offices were on the third floor of the student union, in a cramped space with small windows which faced the setting sun, and when I’d go in to edit in the evenings in spring the windows would be open and the whole room would be bathed in golden light. The people were friendly, helpful, and amicable, and when I’d sit there among them on those evenings, watching them bustle around as they prepared the next day’s paper, I could practically taste the journalism.

I loved that, but I don’t deserve it, because I’m not willing to earn it. I had a great time sitting around up there, palling around with the Emerald staff and pretending like I was a real journalist, but at the end of the day I was the guy who dreaded his deadlines and always looked for the quick, easy, less-controversial topics to write on. That’s the kind of journalism that allowed our last president and his cronies to go to war and get rich on our dime while people on Wall Street played Monopoly with real houses – I don’t want to be that guy. Hell, I don’t even want that guy to exist.

Journalism needs better people than me. Say what you will about the Oregon Daily Emerald, but having spent a year with them I can tell you that those people seriously give a shit about journalism. They’re committed and they work hard. I signed on because I wanted a larger audience to whom I could make dick jokes.

I’m still a journalism major because I think that there’s still a place in that world for me; namely in magazines, the newspaper’s cooler and glossier cousin who drives a Porsche and gets laid all the time. Doing feature stories or writing about movies is right up my alley, and David Sedaris does for The New Yorker basically the same thing that I do here, only he has a large audience, he’s talented, and he has sex with men.

My time at the Emerald was valuable – it taught me that I didn’t want to be an opinion columnist. Arguably the most important thing I’ve learned in college so far, and it didn’t cost me a dime.

Truman Capps will miss that sweet $60 a month…