Journalism is nothing like it used to be. I’ve heard it so many times.
Not that I’ve ever had that old of teachers in journalism classes – most of my instructors have been between the 30 and 45 parameter. But even they, a paltry decade or two older than I, love to toss out those patronizing reminders that we, the up-and-coming, have it all too easy. Instant media has changed everything, the 24 hour news cycle has destroyed real news gathering, and what’s with the Internet and its deluge of bizarre vocabulary? Chats, blogs, tweets? Surely those aren’t real words, especially not ones used by reputable news institutions.
To a certain extent, I nod in class when I hear these gems, spend a brief moment thanking God for Google and how much more accessible my deadlines are because of it, and continue taking notes on my MacBook to later email myself. But I’ve recently come to appreciate the truth of what my teachers say – the world has indeed gone through radical technological changes over a remarkably short period of time, and not everybody has caught up.
While working on a story about the crawfishing industry in Louisiana, Leah and I are venturing off the “grid” and into a world without websites, multiple cell phone numbers or even a presence on Google Maps.
Over the course of our research, we’ve been attempting to locate at least one actual crawfisherman. It doesn’t seem like the hardest task in the crustacean-crazed South, especially considering that it’s prime Lent time in predominantly Catholic New Orleans. Or so we thought.
Our most creative combinations on search engines came up with nothing, but we knew for a fact that mudbugs don’t crawl by themselves into grocery stores and restaurants. Somebody had to be helping them. Without so many words, we tried to convince ourselves of our competence in investigative journalism without the help of our usual crutches. We would hit it old school.
I talked to the owner of a restaurant I’d been working at part-time. He told us where to find a seafood market, but we found it seemed fishermen don’t go there themselves. Middlemen abounded, but the elusive fishers themselves seemed to all be masters of evasion and highly reclusive. None of the people we met could give us an actual name and number or even a rough locations.
So we dug a little deeper and broke out the maps. We picked out likely looking areas, and decided to go there blind. (Given what we knew about crawfish, this was pretty much any town that looked adjacent to a body of water.
This tactic, although seemingly haphazard, yielded a little more. We started meeting people who had a nephew or an old neighbor or a long-lost friend who was in crawfishing for a while, might still be, in fact. They’d spout off long streams of town names where they thought people might be catching crawfish, and we scribbled them down, hurriedly and phonetically.
We drove farther and farther from New Orleans, stopping to ask anybody who looked likely. Though the story isn’t finished yet, we actually started getting results. We got some names, some numbers and some promises.
We mused while driving that this must be what journalism was like Back Then. The glory days when journalists wore fedoras and brought down corrupt administrations instead of pandering to them.
During this story, we had to find real live people, not their email listings. We had to go up and introduce ourselves, try to get leads out of people who didn’t know us from Adam. We’ve driven to random townships and villages, questioned hapless passers-by, both helpful and not, and learned the value of smiling prettily even while being thrown off private property.
Not to sound young and pompous, but we kind of became the real deal today. We fought off our instant-information-induced coma and came to life. Go journalism and long live footwork!
