Last Updated: May 20, 1999
Printer-friendly version
Reporting tools
Although many British journalists find it essential,
U.S. educators — and even secretaries — don’t feel its necessary to teach
Either people need to speak more slowly or I need to write more quickly.
I’ve been telling myself that for 25 years and neither one has happened
yet.
I mourn the great quotes I’ve lost to indecipherable notes and the quotes
abandoned when speakers simply outran my note-taking ability.
And it’s not just me being left in the dust by fast talkers. When I
peer over a reporter’s shoulder at some freshly recorded notes, the mess
I see never inspires confidence.
Yes, a tape recorder can help. But try juggling tapes for three multi-source
stories, all of which are due in two hours. The benefit of the recorder
is usually sacrificed to the reality of the daily writing load.
Thus the question I recently posed to a variety of journalists and journalism
educators here and abroad: If taking notes is so important, shouldn’t journalists
know shorthand?
There’s a world of opinion out there — literally. While U.S. educators
are generally cool to the idea, the skill is considered indispensable to
print reporters on the other side of the Atlantic.
Bernie Corbett, national organizer for Britain’s National Union of Journalists,
explained that most journalism jobs there require an academic “qualification.”
And, he said, most print journalism degree programs require shorthand skills
of 100 words per minute.
“Currently, trainers and editors still maintain that it is an indispensable
core skill,” Corbett said, “but modern attitudes are against them and I
predict the requirement will be dropped some time in the next five to ten
years.”
Corbett said most students study Teeline shorthand, which is easier
to learn than the Pitman method. The top speed for Teeline is about 100
wpm, while Pitman-trained people can sometimes do 300 wpm.
“No journalist ever regrets mastering shorthand, but probably the majority
in Britain now have not done so,” Corbett said.
Kurt Kent, a professor of journalism at the University of Florida, taught
journalism at Bell College of Technology in Hamilton, Scotland in 1996-97.
“All British journeyman journalists know shorthand,” he said. “It’s
one of a number of required subjects in which they must pass tests to qualify
for advanced position.” The students study shorthand for each quarter for
two years, Kent said.
But most U.S. educators feel that there are higher priorities for U.S.
journalism students.
“I would not want to sacrifice a course in economics or math or history
or reporting to enable students to take a course in shorthand,” said Daniel
J. Foley, associate professor of journalism at the University of Tennessee.
“I think students can be introduced to good note-taking techniques in
one or two class sessions as part of a course such as reporting.” Foley
said every reporter develops a system of abbreviations to help take notes
accurately and quickly.
George Harmon at the Medill School at Northwestern University pointed
out that a lack of shorthand has not been cited as a culprit in the spate
of inaccurate reporting that has hit U.S. news organizations this year.
“In 25 years of full- and part-time teaching, I have never known a student
to demand it of a journalism school,” Harmon said.
Again, it’s a matter of time and priorities: “If all the things that
critics of journalism education would ‘require’ of colleges were actually
required, students would be in school an extra four to six years,” he said.
David Boeyink at Indiana University suspects shorthand is a valuable
skill that isn’t taught mainly because instructors themselves don’t know
it.
“What would be ideal would be short courses taught by those who are
experts, perhaps an instructor from a technical school, for those who want
to be note-taking journalists,” he said.
“I also suspect we don’t teach it because it seems to ‘craft’ oriented,
i.e. a skill like typing that would be good to have but that we don’t teach
in the context of a liberal arts education.”
S. Holly Stocking, also at Indiana, suspected the same craft vs. profession
distinction.
“I’ve lived in England, and the difference between the U.S. journalists’
and the U.K. journalists’ note-taking skills is striking,” she said.
“I’m not clear about the origins of the differences. However, it might
be that in the U.S. — at least outside the Ivy League schools — journalism
training is more traditionally associated with higher ed and, as a general
rule, institutions of higher education want little to do with manual skill-training
of any sort, including typing and stenography.
“In the U.K., people tend to acquire their practical journalism skills
on the job, in a kind of apprenticeship system,” she said. “If journalism
were taught at Oxford or Cambridge, I’d wager you would find the same no-steno-skills-taught-here-thank-you attitude as you find in the U.S.”
David Carlson, of the University of Florida, said that early in his
reporting career he was eager to learn shorthand. “But my editors frowned
upon the idea.
“Their reasoning was that if I took notes in shorthand, no one else
would be able to read them in case another reporter would have to do the
story from my notes.” However, he cannot recall a time in his 20 years
of newspapering that someone had to finish a story from his notes.
Carlson favors teaching shorthand, but not at the university level.
“One reason I favor it is that I see more and more students using tape
recorders, which I believe to be a supreme waste of time, unless the story
is particularly controversial or the source is known to later deny the
remarks.”
Indeed, shorthand is losing favor even among secretaries. Susan Fenner,
of Professional Secretaries International, reports that it has been dropped
from most secretarial curricula in favor of “many other skills considered
important.”
A check of a local library found that the most recent Gregg shorthand
book on the shelf had been issued in 1971.
There is a chance that advancing technology will one day settle the
issue for reporters. Consider this: You sit down for an interview, you
open your laptop and plug in a microphone. As you and the story subject
talk, the computer turns your voices into digital signals and records them
on your screen.
When you return to the office, you print out a tidy transcript of the
conversation and start writing your story from clean, complete notes.
That day isn’t here yet, but it’s coming, said Natalie Whitton at Speech
Technology Research Ltd. in Victoria, British Columbia.
“Voice recognition technology can only handle the input of individual
voices. Background noises and other voices interfere with and compromise
the quality of the data,” she said. She looks for the development of a
filter that can process a variety of voices at once.
Patti Price, director of Speech Technology and Research Laboratory at
SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., says her company is working toward
that goal.
“We do have laboratory systems that overnight can transcribe broadcast
news with reasonable error rates for the news broadcasters, who speak very
carefully.” The error rate, she says, is about 10 percent, which is about
as good as closed captions.
She points out that the error rate would be much higher “for the guy
who calls in over the phone in the middle of a tornado with sirens in the
background.”
Rhoades is executive editor of the Sun Journal in Lewiston, Maine.
The quotes in this story were captured via e-mail, rrhoades@sunjournal.com.
