Re: Journalistic Cliches 101 "At the end of the day"

On 30 Sep 2005, Tony Cooper wrote

> On Fri, 30 Sep 2005 12:17:14 GMT, Harvey Van Sickle
><harvey.news@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> On 30 Sep 2005, Tony Cooper wrote
>>
>>> On 29 Sep 2005 17:06:38 -0700, "The Other Fran"
>>> <fran_beta@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Tony Cooper wrote:
>>>>> On 29 Sep 2005 15:36:48 -0700, "The Other Fran"
>>>>> <fran_beta@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> This seems to be one of the more popular at the moment.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> What do you all suppose it means? I have a sense of "when all
>>>>>> is said and done" ...
>>>>>>
>>>>>> It seems to be used to acknowledge as notable but then
>>>>>> trivialise as non-decisive some apparently weighty objection
>>>>>> to something.
>>>>>>
>>>>> It may be a cliche, but is it a "Journalistic Cliche"? A
>>>>> Blogging Cliche or a Conversational Cliche, but a
>>>>> "Journalistic Cliche"? Have you ever seen it in a newspaper
>>>>> other than in a Letter To The Editor section?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> No, but one hears it from radio and TV journos very regularly.
>>>>
>>> Ahh, I forgot about radio and television people being considered
>>> journalists. I don't think of them as journalists, but I do
>>> understand that they claim the title and are accorded the title
>>> by most.
>>>
>>> I consider them newsreaders rather than journalists. There are
>>> the talking heads who sit at desks and read from reports
>>> provided to them by actual newsseekers, the commentators who
>>> provide opinion about what other people do, and the scenery
>>> types that stand in front of a location where something
>>> newsworthy has taken place and report to us on what they have
>>> been told.
>>
>> I don't know about television, but I think that's deeply unfair
>> for radio news.
>
> It may be woundingly unfair to your friend, but is it unfair to
> the general run of radio newsreaders?

(Snip, as I have no basic argument with what you say, just a few
questions.)

A slight misunderstanding I guess, on my part -- I took it that you
were referring to virtually all reports presented on broadcast news,
rather than just the bulletin announcers. (I take it we'd both exclude
filmed/recorded "to camera" pieces which have been researched and
written by "our reporter on the spot"; very few of those, at least on
radio, are handed a script that they've not written themselves.)

But I'm still not sure that for a lot of radio stations -- particularly
the smaller ones -- it's fair to strip even the reader of
his "journalist" status, as I think a number of these have come up
through the ranks and still write most of their own copy. (The ones
who just read press agency reports -- "rip and read" -- certainly used
to be sneered at in journalistic circles for precisely the reasons you
outline; but they used to be the exception rather than the rule.)

Does "no longer writing copy" make someone "no longer a journalist",
though? That is, is a general editor of a newspaper -- who came up
through the system, but who no longer writes or edits copy himself --
no longer a journalist?

You seem to imply that it does, but I'd say they remain journalists in
the same way that the P.Eng. who's now the MD of an engineering firm
can remain an engineer even when he's stopped doing the work himself.

I think that in attempting to ring-fence the designation of
"journalist" to exclude copy-readers, you're catching too many people
to whom the term should still apply.

--
Cheers, Harvey
Canadian (30 years) and British (23 years)
For e-mail, change harvey.news to harvey.van

.

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