News consumer: Haven't you heard? It's all about me

[Greg Collard, News Director, WFAE]

It's easy to find reporters who think their lives are more interesting than the people they cover.

You run into it a lot in this business, especially from the TV newsies. They love to insert themselves into a story. Many live for the clever stand-up. Face time!

But lately, NPR has had me screaming at my radio. Last week, Margot Adler produced a story for All Things Considered about her beloved Central Park trees falling victim to a storm. We learned that Adler is now a storm victim herself. After all, for more than 30 years she's lived in an apartment overlooking Central Park:

"Central Park is my backyard. It's right across the street. It's my country house, my birding forest, my nature. This year, it was my stay-cation place as well."

This was just the opening. I wanted to turn off the radio, but I couldn’t. I had to stick with it to see how far she'd go.

"And I have followed the trees from season to season. There are many species of oaks and maples, horse chestnuts, London planes, elms, beeches, white ash, black locust, bald cypress, mulberries, willows, sweet gum — I could go on and on."

Unfortunately, she did. "At first I couldn't even understand what I was seeing: a huge brown mass behind the rock. It was an enormous root system of a tree upended..."

Oh, the horror.

This week on Morning Edition, it was Larry Abramson's turn. His kid went off to college. Good for both of them.

The experience made Abramson dig out his recorder. The average dorm bed is designed for people taller than 5-10. That means extra long twin-bedding sheets. He had no idea!

His story ends with this disclosure:

"I for one will not be sending care packages to my college student. I have bought my peace of mind with the purchase of Egyptian cotton extra long sheets. But I wonder whether those of us who fit just fine in a regular bed should get some sort of a discount."

NPR humor. Sometimes, it's hard to defend, especially when it's so self-indulgent.

I’m not a purist on these things. But reporters need to know when to say when. We're usually not that interesting.

[Grady Lee Howard]

So-"How sick was she?- Scott Graf. (I couldn't resist the old straight line.) You say-"She was so sick that... (fill in with an extreme humourous description of symptoms of an insane analogy)."

[Grady Lee Howard]

Having had some acquaintance with the NPR staff in Washington (former Congressional staffer) I was always amazed how their stories gravitated to spots such as nearby Rockville and Arlington, even Takoma Park (NPR's bedroom community). I've often heard issues fleshed out by interviewing a sister, neighbor, college buddy or sister-in-law. Radio is blinder than TV, and I think most listeners would be amazed at how incestuous the news biz can become. (TV even has news royalty, with generational succession.) Someday we may catch Greg Collard tugging an earlobe like Carol Burnett. (Hi Mommie!)

Contributors are not like correspondents. Take the Kitchen sisters in New York, who alternate recipes with world shaking issues. Or think about depressive Scott Carrier whose morose filter can be quite enlightening, especially when it comes to the underworld of ruthless life and death issues (double-entendre deadpan). Maybe it is the staffers and regular hosts and correspondents to whom Greg referred. But then again, imagine rotating from a domestic enclave of socio-economic and ideological parity for a war zone stint. These people who risk their lives to inform us have security and language barriers. Is it any surprise they seize onto the lives of their interpreters or the personal issues of troops they embed with?

What I mean to say is that NPR is big and complex with classes of employment and career quality and that Greg can't see it all from his little parochial house, from which he serves the local powers that be.

[Matthew Ryan Vincent]

Also, public radio has so much more to offer than just This American Life. It's the easy go-to, the popular flagship production that I can only imagine those on the production side get tired of hearing cited. Could the argument be made that a reporter's attempts to keep themselves "out" of the story have always been in vain? And as our culture becomes more media-savvy, the more the culture automatically pulls back the curtain to analyze the not only what the news is about, but those making the news. Allow me to link to something about the creation of fiction, but I think it applies to the current state of the public's relationship to Journalism: click here.

[Greg Collard, News Director, WFAE]

Matt - thanks for the comment. I agree that This American Life is a fantastic show. One of my favorites. The difference with people who report for TAL is they don't try to make themselves bigger than the story. The story is always the priority, not their personal circumstances. I don't think that was the case with the examples noted above. I think the reporters' own needs drove them to produce the stories. Their personal circumstances did not make for compelling radio.

[Matthew Ryan Vincent]

Do you think this type of humanistic reporting has anything to do with the popularity of shows like This American Life? Of course, TAL continues to be the number one podcast on iTunes. Maybe people find this type of reporting more honest, more interesting. The idea that the reporter can be invisible strikes me as disingenuous, a strange attempt to accrue authority using the omniscient narrator. The days of "just the facts" may be numbered.

[Scott Graf]

So I guess this would be a bad time to pitch you my "my child was sick so I stayed home with her for two days" commentary idea?