Even when political reporting is not reduced to personality, political photography is. An article might offer depth and complexity, but is illustrated with a photo of one of the 10 politicians whose picture must be attached to every news story.
News, after all, is a spin of words and pictures. It's a kind of music. There are beats in a newscast, a newspaper story. Ed Murrow sounded like Ed Murrow. Huntley and Brinkley sounded different. Anderson Cooper, different still.
The news business is simple but it's not easy to do well. You know the story, you have to cover it, you need pictures, you need good writers, you have to get it to the screen but it's obviously not easy to do well.
Television news was expanding to an hour, and producers did not know how to fill the space and time.
Women bring things to the storytelling of news that is maybe more relatable to the women that are consuming.
I feel really blessed to work in a place that values me for what I bring as a journalist and as a professional storyteller and navigator of the news. But I also know that they appreciate about me, my perspective as a woman, as a black woman.
I think what drove me away from being a reporter was an inability to accept that the world came in neat stories. Every story you have to report is just part of something bigger. The news isn't what happened last night - it's some cumulative thing that's happened over centuries. I found it hard to think of one event and drag it out of a bubbling pot and present it as the story that explains it all.
It's no longer just reporting the headlines of the day, but trying to put the headlines into some context and to add some perspective into what they mean.
Reporters have a different point of view and a different job. Consequently, to the extent that you can help them turn in an interesting story that their editor is going to like and that's going to further their careers, they're going to give you more ink and cover you.
I always try to describe the situation just as it is. I try to find sentences that I believe tell the story best. Even my articles are more literary than ordinary news stories.
