David Trinko: Good journalists can feed hungry minds

Jun. 22—The comment comes around so often and predictably, it's almost funny to this middle-aged journalism.

Yet there it was again this week, someone questioning on Facebook why journalists even exist in this age of everyone having their say on social media.

As I often do, I thought about food.

A microwave and an oven both make food hot. That doesn't mean they do the same job, though.

Sure, a microwave is a convenient, fast tool for bringing something up to a tolerable temperature for consumption. That's how I often feel about the comments and posts I see on social media. They're fine, for what they are, little pieces of information to sustain you for a bit.

But if you want foods with deep, complex flavors and varied textures throughout, you really need an oven with some time devoted to doing the job right. Good journalists do the same thing with the articles they write.

We spent some time in our newsroom this week discussing what our readers ought to expect from us.

We talked about the importance of providing an objective and sometimes dispassionate retelling of the facts. We discussed the benefits to being skeptical about anything we're told, as evidenced by the old journalism joke: "If your mother tells you she loves you, find a second source."

We know it's important to ask all the questions readers want answered. It's important to be timely. It's best to uncover or create original material you haven't seen before.

Most of all, you want us to provide context to the news, helping you piece together how the new nugget fits into what you already know about the world.

Then, for good measure, we try to write it in language that anyone with a middle-school education could understand, even if it makes our sources think we oversimplify complicated topics.

That's what our staff promised to do on your behalf.

Good journalists find multiple sources with better points of view to help them better understand the material. They understand how to dig into public records or when they should trust survey results. The best journalists want to be the first to report the story but also want to report it best.

It's not an easy world to do this, when people on all levels, from local all the way up to national, believe sending you a quote to include in the story is more important than having a conversation and answering some questions. Some of the best answers I've received over the years followed their response, "That's a good question." Those are the ideas that no one would think to include in a press release.

A trained journalist also knows a lot about the audience. I have decades of statistics from print and online that show that even though you say you want to read upbeat stories, negative news grabs your interest and makes you remember it. You'll claim to want to know a lot about a topic, yet most of you won't make it past the fifth paragraph of a story.

We try to use that knowledge to help you see what you ought to learn up near the top of a story, before going into more specifics later. That's the reason why journalists put deaths and injuries in a traffic accident near the top, while law enforcement often writes press releases chronologically and puts those details at the very end.

We're not interested in telling you what to think. We just want to share the facts we've found to help you understand the news.

So, to bring it back to that food analogy, there will always be a need for ovens as long as there's a public that appreciates savory, well-balanced meals. The same can be said for journalists feeding the minds of curious readers.

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See past columns by David Trinko at LimaOhio.com/tag/trinko.

David Trinko is editor of The Lima News. Reach him at 567-242-0467, by email at dtrinko@limanews.com or on Twitter @Lima_Trinko.