Last Updated: December 29, 2000
Printer-friendly version
Journalism reporters
Covering business of news
Felicity Barringer, 49, is a must-read for America’s newspaper editors.
Her newspaper industry beat is one of six in the New York Times’ media
desk, which is staffed by seven reporters directed by editor Dave Smith.
Although the assignments look clear on paper — the beats are book publications,
magazine publishing, TV, advertising, business of the media and newspapers
— the reality, Barringer said, “is any given day, we’re all over each other’s
beats.”
Barringer joined The New York Times full time in 1993 after starting
out with the Bergen (N.J.) Record and then moving to The Washington Post.
She began stringing for the Times in 1986, when her husband was posted
to Moscow and top editors at the Times did not want a spouse of their Moscow
reporter working for the Post.
In her years at the Times, she has been both a reporter and editor,
including editing stints for the Week in Review and the Monday Business
section. She returned to reporting two years ago.
“I concluded I had another 20 years left in my career and I could spend
them all editing and work in that world, which I found satisfying, or I
could spend them reporting. But I had to make up my mind. I decided if
I had only one life, I wanted to live it as a reporter.’’
This is an edited transcript:
AMERICAN EDITOR: You are an entirely different species from a media
critic.
BARRINGER: I’m not a critic. My bottom line is I am a media reporter.
I occasionally write a media column in which, it being a column in the
news section, you have a little more latitude for analysis and can throw
in a few more adjectives, but it’s still a news product and it has to obey
news strictures. I can not say somebody’s bad or good.
In some sense, that’s a very important discipline. I have to show with
my reporting what’s out there.
Q. When you look at the industry as a whole, should there be more
media criticism, more self-examination?
A. Should the industry cover itself? Absolutely. Should it cover itself
closely? Absolutely. Should that include both its journalism and what’s
happening in the business world—which, of course, is in some ways where
the most dramatic story is right now? Absolutely.
The difference between a reporter and a critic is at some level if the
critic is a good reporter, there’s going to be an awful lot of similarity
in the information produced. If you’re throwing the facts out there and
letting an institution or an individual or an industry look at itself through
the facts you produce, I’m not sure you’re not being a good critic by just
doing that.
Q. Do you generate most of your own story ideas?
A. Probably somewhere between 50 and 75 percent. I’ve always found in
my career that if you’re generating less than 50 percent of the ideas,
you’re not terribly happy with yourself, and if you’re generating 100 percent,
you need a better editor.
A lot of them are collaboration. I had been wanting to do a story on
Detroit for some months, and when the appeals court decision came down,
my editor and I both instantly said, hey how about going to Detroit? The
next day I was on a plane to Detroit.
Q. Do you get a lot of editors and people in the industry from outside
New York calling you a lot?
A. If you don’t go out and beat the bushes, stuff doesn’t generally
come in to you. First I try to make sure my Rolodex is always expanding.
It’s very easy on any beat—and this is no different from any beat—to become
comfortable with some people you respect in the world you cover and to
turn to them for comments, for questions about what’s happening in the
industry. Like any other beat, it can become limiting if you don’t keep
reaching out for new and different people in both the print world and the
online world.
Q. Do you cover the on-line world as well?
A. I do. That divides a little bit between us (on the media desk), but
I do cover the development of journalism online both in terms of the business
models that people are groping toward and just in terms of the journalism?
Q. Do you find that the industry is more thin-skinned than other
entities?
A. Certainly people in politics have thicker skins than people in journalism.
I would guess people in the arts probably have thinner skins, but that’s
just a guess.
Journalists read stories about themselves with an intimate knowledge
of how you go about reporting and constructing a story.
If they are inclined to be thin-skinned, they can easily see the 17
different ways it could have been approached and can feel hurt and aggrieved
that what they view as the wrong approach was taken. For those who go through
the same process of reading a story knowing the 17 different ways it could
have been reported and written and still see the validity of the final
product, even thought they may not like it—both types are out there. One
tends to hear more from the thin-skinned.
Q. How did you get into journalism?
A. The joke that I tell family and friends — and it’s true — is that
my best friend in high school was made editor of the newspaper because
they felt I was not entirely reliable. I was made editor of the literary
magazine, and she’s the one with a Ph.D. in literary criticism. I started
on the college newspaper about mid-way through my freshman year (at Stanford
University).
