There’s a line I sometimes recite when I feel I’ve reached a professional roadblock.
It’s a punchline from an eighth-season episode of Seinfeld, where George Costanza is trying to spin his meager life triumphs amid countless failures into a grand success story.
“You know,” he says, “if you take everything I’ve accomplished in my entire life and condense it down into one day … it looks decent!”
When I watched two decades ago, I laughed with everyone else. We’re supposed to laugh at George. The line is meant to mock him.
But these days, it’s become somewhat of a mantra, a reminder of the power of the big picture. When I feel stagnant in my career, I reflect on what I’ve accomplished and discover a lengthier list than I realized. When I’m shooting a story and don’t feel like I’m capturing what I need, I aim to stay focused and remember I might feel differently by day’s end. In the moment, I often dwell on mistakes and failures. In the aggregate, I see a career that, condensed into a few paragraphs, looks decent.
And in 2020, when limitations and frustrations loomed over every day, I leaned on George’s line – or, at least, the optimism within it – to push through.
As a journalist, my biggest adversary is perhaps my own cynicism.
It’s easy to lose that battle. I see the continual triumph of style over substance. I see the burnout suffered by many of my younger colleagues. I see a shrinking number of pieces that truly have an impact.
More than that, I see a far-too-frequent unwillingness to take on the mountainous issues of our time, mainly because of their mountainous-ness. How does one cover a subject, for example, like income inequality, which has been on the rise for decades but seems too widespread and abstract to truly digest?
In my role at WXIA-TV in Atlanta, I receive the chance every few months to produce a documentary, and I often get to choose the subject. I must run it up the ladder of management, of course, and it must fit within the confines and content of our evening newscasts, but I receive much more freedom in story selection than most.
So when I returned from paternity leave earlier this year, ready to embark on a new project, I chose the topic that affects Atlanta more than any city in America.
But I didn’t know how I’d broach the subject. I reached out to several experts in the region, often over the phone but occasionally in person, and I sought potential vehicles that would allow for the necessary depth, detail, and humanity. I emerged with three concepts, wrote proposals for each, and pitched them to my bosses for their preference.
I had heard about a program that provides a free 20-day crash course in construction for low-income Atlantans, regardless of their background in either construction or life. Many students have a criminal record. Most rely on public transportation. Some are – or recently were – homeless. But when they graduate, they leave with entry-level construction credentials and, 95% of the time, a job with a major Atlanta construction company.
Suddenly my project wasn’t only about income inequality. It was about the challenges and pathways for those in poverty who look to rise up. And it offered a chance to view the issue through the people who live it.
I essentially embedded with a class, from Day 1 to Day 20, and selected several students who agreed to tell me their stories, warts included. Three had served prison sentences. Two were parents looking to do right by their families. All had a purpose difficult to condense or categorize.
This week, four months after I began working on the documentary, I released the finished product online. It airs three times this weekend on WXIA, and it has already received hundreds of views on YouTube and positive reaction on social media. That’s without much promotion aside from my own.
I think often about our platform as journalists and how we choose to use it. Regardless of our status in the newsroom, we all make editorial decisions from the micro (e.g. how we choose to light an interview) to the macro (e.g. how we choose to present controversial issues). I am heartened by the number of web sites and outlets that have found a winning formula for producing relevant content and finding a wide audience. We often struggle to replicate this in local TV news, but I see examples all the time that push back my cynicism and strengthen my resolve.
Sometimes that’s the biggest hill to climb. I’m proud whenever I reach the summit.
Matt Pearl is the author of the Telling the Story blog and podcast. Feel free to comment below or e-mail Matt at matt@tellingthestoryblog.com. You can also follow Matt on Facebook and Twitter.
The MMJ Survey has been catching quite a bit of attention.
In the past few weeks, I have released the results of — and written several pieces about — the MMJ Survey, in which nearly 100 solo video journalists in local TV news said how they felt about the job and industry. I conducted the survey in part because I had never seen anything like it before; I know how unique the MMJ life can be, and I wanted those in the role to feel enabled to make their voices heard.
Thankfully, I have been able to amplify those voices far beyond this blog.
In the past few weeks, I have written a column for one web site and been interviewed for a column on another. I want to share them here, and I will return with the regular rotation of columns and podcasts starting next week.
An MMJ Life | Battling burnout (TV News Storytellers): I was able to reach such a large swath of solo video journalists for my survey by posting on a pair of Facebook groups. One was MMJane, a group exclusively for female MMJs; I interviewed their administrators, Sarah-Blake Morgan and Katie Eastman, on my most recent podcast episode.
The other group is TV News Storytellers, whose founder Matt Mrozinski joined me last year on the podcast.
Matt and I spoke about me writing a column about the survey, and I chose to isolate the very real issue of MMJ burnout. I went through it as a young journalist, and I write in this piece about how I got through it.
MMJs love their jobs, often don’t feel safe (NPPA.org): This article, written by Tom Burton with the NPPA and News Photographer Magazine, tackles another glaring result from the MMJ Survey.
It talks about safety.
Burton interviewed me about the survey and seemed particularly interested in the concerns of many MMJs about being placed in potentially dangerous situations. That said, we covered a variety of topics, and Burton hits most of them in this write-up.
I just know this: it’s from 1964, and it’s outstanding.
Amanda Emily, the historian extraordinaire for TV News Storytellers, unearthed this chapter from Fred Mooke, then the managing editor at WTVJ-TV in Miami. Mooke discusses the rise of the one-man band … more than five decades ago.
I don’t want to spoil any of it. But solo video journalists out there need to give it a read. It’s amusing, to say the least.
Matt Pearl is the author of the Telling the Story blog and podcast. Feel free to comment below or e-mail Matt at matt@tellingthestoryblog.com. You can also follow Matt on Facebook and Twitter.
