 |
|
| HOME | Faces of the News |
|
By DAYNA FIELDS AND ERIN J. BERNARD In a world where news arrives from an increasingly fragmented array of sources, citizens are finding themselves further and further removed from the journalists they depend on to explain their worlds. Local news personalities, however, often have a more intimate understanding of the communities they serve and are thus uniquely positioned to provide news with deep context and relevance. Here, four Columbia media personalities discuss their craft and the communities they serve.
What do you love about your chosen medium? “I enjoy telling stories in TV because in no other medium do you have words married with pictures in such a unique way. At the same moment the reader is listening to that story, they’re seeing the picture. No other medium can tell stories the way TV can.” How has the community responded to your work? “The response has been tremendous. People appreciate the fact that there are important stories to tell outside of mid-Missouri. I get e-mails, phone calls, letters, people stop me on the street — it’s great that people recognize you. ... You’re instantly friends and it’s always great to make a new friend.” What do you think your audience expects from you? “Our viewers expect accuracy, compassion — they expect us to be watchdogs. They expect us to hold the public’s trust, to seek truth and report it. It’s what I learned many years ago at MU and it’s what I’m doing here today.” How do you work to represent the community? “I try to hold up a mirror … and tell people, ‘This is what’s going on in your community.’ A lot of my stories don’t come from a news release or a wire story. I truly believe the best stories come from word of mouth. Whenever I hear the three words, ‘There’s this guy,’ my ears instantly perk up.” How is your medium changing? “The Internet has made it easier to tell stories. You can reach a larger audience. Our stories don’t have an expiration date like they used to. They will perpetually air in cyberspace.” Tell us a story that illustrates what you do. “A woman told me, ‘There’s this guy you need to tell a story about. He has a unique Christmas display.’ I could tell there was something about this guy she couldn’t quite put her hands on, so I showed up on his doorstep. He greeted us and said, ‘Hold on a second and let me get my cane.’ I thought he was going to get a walking cane, but he came out with a white cane. This gentleman who was blind was out there day in and day out stringing Christmas lights by feel, and that was what the viewer couldn’t articulate. She knew there was something special about him. He set up the lights year after year because he wanted people to be able to see the spirit of Christmas even though he couldn’t see it himself. That story would never have come from a press release.” How did you become a media personality? “My family has owned the newspaper since 1905. I’m the third publisher and I’ve been the publisher since 1966. So I began writing editorials back then and you just keep doing it all this time and people react and, of course, people get to know us. Me in particular because I’m the most visible person — or I have been — and the most controversial when there’s controversy, meddling in everyone’s business.” Talk about your newspaper’s relationship with the community. “Well, you develop credibility, or lack of it, day by day, over all this time. I hope the community has found us to be intelligent enough, sincere and honest. And those are the things you can’t manufacture, you just have to sort of develop that day by day. So I think that our relationship with our community is pretty good. Some people get mad at us, of course, if we do something that they don’t like, but that’s part of being a newspaper I think.” What are the advantages of your medium? “Newspapers are prominent, you know. The other media, you might be able to find some digital sound preservation, but I don’t think you can call up KOMU-TV and ask them to send you a recording of the news that they had seven years ago on such and such a day on such and such a thing. We do a lot of archival research for people. We report things that nobody else does, like school lunch menus, obituaries — where is all the obituary news? In the newspaper. You don’t see that on TV or anywhere else.” What are the disadvantages of your medium? “Newspapers aren’t the fastest anymore. But speed — I mean, how fast does it need to be? Of course breaking news, when the 9/11 attacks occurred, everybody wanted to quickly watch that on television because it’s dramatic and everyone’s vitally interested in it, and that’s valid news and a valid medium for that event. But newspapers are just more in-depth and more substantial. Like the coverage of the details of the City Council meetings, I mean, what matches the newspaper for that? Certainly not the radio — you can get the highlights, and you can get it quicker maybe, if they cover it at all. But newspapers are just more substantial and comprehensive.” What do your readers expect from you? “Well, I hope they expect me to be informative and halfway smart and honest and sincere. If they see something in my column, they know that it’s done in motivation of trying to inform, or editorials try to persuade, but not with a crooked motive, so to speak.” What’s the best part of your job? “The best part is that I get to be interested and involved in every single thing that happens in the town, almost. I talk medicine to doctors and politics to politicians and government to government officials, and business to business people and finance to bankers, and the whole town is our oyster, so to speak. That’s the most exciting thing.” Tomás C. Custer runs Hispanictips.com, an English-language Web site that aggregates national news for Hispanics, and Columbiatips.com, a site that aggregates Columbia news. What do you love about your chosen medium? “There’s no limit of space compared to print, and compared to TV and radio, there’s no limit of time. The visitor has the choice. The other advantage is the ability to organize things. It’s the freedom of choice to seek what we want.” How has the community responded to your work? “People really are happy with what I’m doing. ... And it’s not only Hispanics but also Gringos. Most Hispanic media is Spanish language, and it makes sense that something in English would be useful. ... It has nothing to do with language but with relevance. What makes Hispanictips.com useful is it’s 100 percent relevant to Hispanics.” How do you build trust with your audience? “By doing what nobody else is doing and doing it consistently. And I don’t just cover big stories but also stories about community centers and small towns that get grants. ... I’m a one-person show. I have my picture up there. This is me.” What’s the hardest part of your job? “Staying consistent. Four to five times a week, I have to sit down and collect 50 to 100 stories, organize them, tag them, then produce the summaries and send it out.” What’s the best part of your job? “Instead of being an employee, I’m doing something for myself that helps other people. That’s truly the best thing. I get buzzed knowing that ... people are reading something I produced and some of them are impacted enough that they write me back.” Tell us a story that illustrates what you do. “A safety director at a small company wrote to thank me because my Web site helped him to understand his Hispanic employees. I’ve been surprised by the amount of non-Hispanic interest in the site.” What’s your background in journalism? “I wrote on my high school newspaper. I took journalism classes at the University of Wisconsin when I was working on my Ph.D. I worked for the Milwaukee Journal and Channel 4 NBC in the ’60s, and so I have had some experience off and on. I had enough to know what it was and to be on staffs at different times. And now I am associate editor for a paper in Hawaii, which is called Mahogany, for people of color in Hawaii.” What makes you a Columbia media personality? “I don’t know that my sole recognition is that of a media personality. I’m a personality, for sure, because I’ve been here since ’72, when the town was quite small, and I was the second African-American hired by the university to teach. I know a lot of people, so I’m a personality anyway. I tend to be outgoing as a person. I do a lot of letters to the editor, and I’ve constantly been outspoken in terms of issues, and then I have a newspaper, which allows me to do a lot of things.” What does it mean to you to be seen as a personality? “Everybody knows that I own the paper (The Trumpet). They know that I’m trying to serve another audience, they know that I’ve done it orally anyway. But now I can do it through a published medium. I call in on news radio and stuff, by now I have a vehicle by which I do it otherwise.” What do your readers expect from you? “The real low down. They expect me to have examined the topics that I am writing on and researched it and that I write a balanced story. You know, giving both sides and not playing games with them; honesty, transparency and a flavor of the community.” How do you earn the trust of your audience? “By having a track record of integrity. You know, and by being open and being capable of changing my mind — if I find out additional information that says what I was saying as being wrong and if you can convince me. I demand that you document support if you’re going to convince me, but I’m also willing to indicate your opinion whether you’ve done it or not, whether you’ve supported it or not.” What’s the best part of your job? “The best part is that there’s enthusiasm about it and people like it. When you do something and people like it, it makes you think that what you’re doing is worthwhile. ...(I know they like it) because they tell me. Because they call in. Because they write in. Because they tell me what they think.” |
Sarah Hill has won four Emmys for her reporting. Among other things, Hill is the 5 p.m. anchor for KOMU and a feature reporter for the weekly segment “Sarah’s Stories.” 
Hank Waters is the editor and publisher of the Columbia Daily Tribune.
William “Gene” Robertson founded, writes, produces and distributes — and sometimes sponsors — The Trumpet, a quarterly newspaper in Columbia that caters to the black community.