Center for Scholastic Journalism Blog

While a stringer at my hometown paper in the mid-’70s, I was paid 25 cents per inch for features and stories on public meetings of rural school boards, township trustees and village councils. This was the rate paid to all correspondents, as we were glamorously called.

It wasn’t long before I noticed that the longest stories in the newspaper carried the bylines of people like me. Staff reporters wrote much shorter articles, better focused. Stories written by stringers dwelled overly on every ordinance, resolution, argument, chuckle and sneeze; the people’s right to know, I’m sure we rationalized.

My goodness, how we went on and on in 1975 about every village’s plan to paint all the fire hydrants red, white and blue to honor the American Bicentennial the next year.

Of course, complete, detailed reporting wasn’t really the goal; reader needs had far less to do with those tomes than the need to fill the gas tanks of our rust-bucket cars and justify the long haul to the newspaper’s hinterlands. To earn a trifling $10, a stringer had to turn out 40 inches.

Two problematic products of the newspaper’s correspondent pay practice:

1. Endless stories that few would read, and

2. Bad writing habits among the writers trying to find their way into the business.

I’m pleased to report that when I became city editor years later, I junked that pay procedure and paid stringers per piece, each story shaped around the most important question the writer could answer for his or her audience at that particular moment.

This is more than an anecdote. It’s a warning about what can happen when we take our eye off the true goal of journalism: Serving the community.

Behaviors learned young are hard to break. And just as the community was secondary to our lust for those quarters, so can it be when we seek peer recognition for our work, yet another type of compensation.

I think about this every time I help high school advisers select contest entries and when I’m asked to judge scholastic news competitions.

I wonder how much different the work might be if the students — and as important, their advisers — would keep their focus on the audience rather than on year-end praise and prizes.

How many different kinds of stories, told in ways more appealing to readers, would materialize if student reporters and editors weren’t worried about pleasing a panel of judges who cling to antique commandments having more to do with uniformity than engaging an audience?

Sure, this can be dicey, as it would require a new kind of trust in our student journalists, a different kind of advising and administrations more concerned about education and communication than control. But it would be worth the effort. As it stands, the lesson implicitly imparted by contests puts the audience second and compromises the best goals of journalism. I’ve yet to encounter a single judging panel that can guarantee correct conclusions about the most important goals of journalism: accuracy and community service.

We need to rethink this business. That’s my 25-cents’ worth, anyway.