1. Know The Post‘s Principles

The Washington Post is one of the finest newspapers in the nation and the world. For a very long time, it was owned by the Meyer family who, along with the Sulzberger family of The New York Times, embodied the highest ideals of American journalism. In a casual interview with Gary Lee, a former Washington Post and New York Times journalist who spent years covering foreign policy, travel, and the environment and is now a freelance journalist. Lee told students that we were learning a noble profession—that a good newspaper is vital to society. He said that the ideal paper contains two types of stories on its front page every day: the lede story, containing the day’s most important news, which every citizen should read, and a “buzz story,” containing the day’s most interesting, exciting, fascinating, or amusing news, which every citizen would desire to read. To successfully find and report both those stories, he said, the journalists at The Washington Post consciously commit, every single day, to the standards of the paper’s founder, Eugene Meyer.

Here are Mr. Meyer’s principles. He delivered them in a speech on March 5, 1935. They are on a plaque in the newspaper’s front lobby; the reporters and editors pass by them several times a day:

• The newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it, concerning the important affairs of America and the world.
• As a disseminator of news, the paper shall observe the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman.
• What it prints shall be fit reading for the young as well as the old.
• The newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners.
• In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such a course be necessary for the public good.
• The newspaper shall not be the ally of any special interest, but shall be fair and free and wholesome in its outlook on public affairs and public men.

Gary Lee and his colleagues at The Post take these principles very seriously, and so should you—learn them, abide by them, fight for them, and cherish them.

2. Commit to the Truth

The most important of Mr. Meyer’s focused and elegant principles is the first one. His newspaper’s mission is to “tell the truth to the extent that it can be ascertained,” and that should be your mission too.

Newspapers are non-fiction documents. They are a public record of a society’s experiences, and they become, over time, the narrative of a society’s history. Readers of a newspaper trust that it publishes the truth; if what is printed is untrue, that trust has been betrayed. And then of course the power of the press is eroded, and the democracy suffers, for if readers don’t believe what they read, they won’t respond. They won’t act, won’t vote, won’t call their congresspeople to say something should be done about human trafficking. They won’t even believe the human trafficking exists.

So newspapers take great pains to get their stories right. But newspapers are not machines; they are created by humans doing their jobs, so of course there are mistakes and errors in papers all the time. The important point is: the mistakes can’t be deliberate. They can’t be lies, falsifications, distortions, or deceptions. And when the mistakes are discovered, they must be corrected immediately, to set the public record straight.

So if you want to write for a newspaper, you must be committed right from the start to seeking the truth to the extent that you can find it. And you can’t go off pretending to seek the truth, while really you’re out to gather a few facts and jot down a few notes and race to the keyboard to write something gorgeous that people will read and swoon over and then ask you out on dates. Because if that’s your motivation, you’ll probably overwrite in the first place. Far more importantly, you won’t have really thought through your story or done the careful work of reporting it thoroughly, and you won’t bring the truth home to your editor. You’ll bring some approximation of the truth, and then it will need to be reviewed, edited, changed, cut down or added to, and more.

The whole notion of truth can be complicated, as anyone who’s ever used the passive voice can attest. (Me: What happened to the lamp? My kids: We were playing soccer and the lamp got broken. Verdict: The kids told “the truth.”) And newspaper editors know as well as 10-year-olds do how tricky the idea of truth can be. They know that which stories they cover versus those they ignore, and the sources contacted versus those not called, and the quotes included versus those left out, and the story’s tone, and the story’s place in the paper, on what page, with what headlines, in what type, with (or without) what photos all affect how well the story reveals the “truth.” We’ll look at all this in the next chapter. We’ll discuss the concepts of “fairness” and “balance” too. Hey, we can get altogether existential if anyone’s in the mood.

You might take a moment now to consider these things in some depth, by reading the following links. The first is a September 2012 blog post by Margaret Sullivan in her role as the public editor of The New York Times, in which she considers how newspapers should cover political campaigns when the parties and candidates themselves spin the truth. The second leads to special coverage of “Truth in the Age of Social Media” by the Neiman Foundation for Journalism, in which you’ll find links to half a dozen superb articles. Finally, step into the shoes of a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan and read this article to find out what happens when the press is gutted and there are too few journalists covering certain stories.

But if any of this makes you worry about your ability to be a responsible journalist, then for now just remember that if you are trying earnestly to seek the truth about a story, you will have a good chance of finding it.

In January of 1971, The Washington Post received a letter to the editor from a reader who was distressed that the paper had described Helen Keller as “deaf and dumb.” The editors were ashamed that the language had slipped through. I always ask my students why the editors felt this way, and my students wisely point out that Helen Keller was extremely intelligent, while the word “dumb” carries the opposite connotation. And yes, that is so. But here’s the bigger problem: Helen Keller was deaf and blind.

The truth can be complicated but it’s also very simple. If you get your facts right, half the battle’s won.

There is a story by Rabbi Neil Kominsky that will help you remember this. It is the story of a motivational speaker at a CEO convention. The speaker took a big glass beaker and filled it with rocks and asked the audience, “Is this beaker full?”

One of the CEOs raised his hand. “Yes,” he said, “the beaker is full.”

The motivational speaker said, “Wait just a minute.” He then poured gravel into the beaker.

“Is it full now?” he asked.

Getting the picture, the CEOs shook their heads. “No,” they said.

Then he poured in some sand. “Is it full now?”

“No!” they shouted.

Finally, the motivational speaker poured water into the beaker. “Now is it full?”

And the CEOs shouted, “Yes, it is!”

And the motivational speaker said, “Okay! And what’s the lesson we learn from this?”

A CEO raised her hand and said, “The lesson is that when you think you’ve done enough, there’s always more you can do or learn.”

“No,” said the motivational speaker. “The lesson? Put the big rocks in first.”

When you report your stories, put the big rocks in first. Get the facts. No exceptions.

We began this section of the book talking about The Washington Post and its list of principles, which have guided journalists at The Post for nearly a century. So now you should know that in the summer of 2013, the Graham family sold The Post to Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon.com. The sale crystallized, in one fell swoop, the revolution sweeping through the American press, as one of the country’s iconic newspaper families sold their storied flagship paper—the paper from the nation’s capital, the paper that broke Watergate—to a dot-com billionaire.

The sale was a shock, no doubt. But most reactions were, surprisingly, positive.

Experts in finance believe Bezos has a long-term plan for making the paper profitable.

And journalists believe that Bezos will cling tight to those principles that you so wisely memorized.

3. Dread Mistakes

Your stories will have a big impact on people’s lives. This is true of even small or ordinary stories, simply because they’re read by so many people. You may not fully understand this until you get blowback for what you wrote or reported.

Here is a story of what happened to an anonymous reporter:

I fully understood this only after I’d turned in my first article for the Winston-Salem Journal in August of 1980. I woke at 3 a.m., panicking. The paper was already on the delivery trucks; what if the story was wrong?

I’d been sent out to cover a drug bust, and not knowing what else to do, I had rung the doorbell of the guy who’d been arrested. Evidently out of jail on bail, he answered the door and then answered my questions. What dumb luck. I came back with a scoop. It was so great.

Then the city editor grilled me on my facts, and the terrifying managing editor (whose glass office we called the Rage Cage) grilled me on my facts, and I answered all of their questions. I was dismissed and congratulated. The story would run on page one.

But now at 3 a.m. I realized: What if the guy who answered the bell wasn’t the drug guy after all? What if he was pretending to be the drug guy, but really he was that guy’s prankster brother? What if I’d been hoodwinked like crazy, and my editor, unable to imagine I could possibly be that stupid, hadn’t caught my mistake?

In that case, I was about to WRONG some innocent man. And, I knew how it felt to be wronged, just as everyone who has a sibling knows the feeling that comes over you when your sister tells your mother that YOU hit her first, and your mother, incredibly, believes it.

And I knew that if I ever opened a newspaper and read something about myself that was unfair or untrue, I would feel that same shock and fury, that same existential horror that a lie about me was being taken for truth. I didn’t want to make anyone else feel that way, ever. I especially didn’t want to make someone feel that way 75,000 times, which is how many issues of the Winston-Salem Journal were just then making their way onto the city’s lawns.

The next morning, the drug story turned out to be fine. I should have known it would be; I should have trusted the editors. My panic was just the smallest bit irrational. A lunatic brother, ha! Still, that long, grim sleepless night stayed with me, and I took meticulous care never to make mistakes about people in print.

In this field, you must be careful, too. First because you never want to inflict the sort of pain that comes with an unfair characterization in the press. If you’ve never had it happen to you, you can’t really understand how dreadful it is. But try to imagine. Of course you would never, ever deliberately mischaracterize someone in print (that would be cowardly, after all—better to have the guts to hit that person over the head with a rock), but you must take care that you don’t do it accidentally, either.

Secondly, you must dread mistakes because they might make you timid. There’s a saying: “A scalded cat fears even cold water.” When you make mistakes, you get scalded. You feel bad, of course; plus you may get screamed at by an editor, or sued. You will wish your story could be unpublished, your words unread. But they can’t be, and all the corrections in the world can’t unmuddy the waters that you’ve muddied. So after you make a mistake in print, you will feel timid for a while, worrying that you might screw up again.

You can’t be timid. You must be courageous. As a journalist, you act on behalf of the people in your community. You’re not you; you’re “the people”—just the one of them who happens to have the little notebook. You are a watchdog against abuses of power, and you are the chronicler of your community’s truth. You cannot be afraid to dig around and bring the truth to light, even when it’s unpleasant. So don’t get scalded by making mistakes, because then you might lose your courage on stories you’ve got right.

If you aim to become skilled reporter, maybe with special knowledge in one focused area, and if you know The Post‘s principles, commit to the truth, and dread mistakes, you will have the skills and motivation to produce splendid work. Of course no one is perfect—you’ll screw up. But your editors will have your back.