Political Reporting at its finest-Walter Mears

Deadlines. Instant News. 24-hour news cycle. Journalist in the newspaper and television industry are calling this process “new.” More so than that, there is also a “new” concern for credibility and truthiness in such a fast turn-around news environment.

But they couldn’t be more wrong. Walter Mears, now retired, worked in just that fashion for over 40 years as an Associated Press Reporter.

“In fact, Mears said [truthiness] is not new, it just exploded in the internet age.”

Thinking about it is overwhelming really. Here is this man standing in front of our Critical Writing class at 6:00 at night talking about all things journalism. I am listening to him and his stories and thoughts about newspapers and reporting and my thought started to wander a bit.

But then it hit me, I was sitting in front of a great man, a pioneer journalist. Mears covered 11 Presidential campaigns from 1960 to 2000. He even won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Carter-Ford race. This man is political reporting.

And with all that he is, and all that he represents I was most amused by his anecdotal stories about how newspapers used to be.

“There was a time when newspapers would plaster play by play of the World Series on the windows because no one could see it,” said Mears

That is astonishing to me. Today, forget about television, there are many avenues you can take to watch the World Series. You can get version of the old-style play-by-play plastering thought a countless amount of websites. You can get a video feed though mlb.com, you can even sit in on a live blog from a writer at the game. It is amazing how much things have advanced in just 50 years.

Mears also spoke a lot about the AP and its place in the newspaper world today as opposed to the 1950’s and 60’s when he first got his start.

He brought up things I never thought about. I read AP stories every day in the newspapers, but it never occurred to me that with the dying newspapers, AP would also be hurting. The wire does provide a valuable service to newspapers though.

“At one point there were close to 20 people from AP in Iraq,” said Mears, “No newspaper can afford to do that.”

AP is not going to disappear. Sure newspapers are in trouble but AP found a way to grow with the technology that has many journalist sacred for their jobs. It is easy. Move to the internet, that is where everyone seems to go for their news anyway.

“AP has figured out how to charge for the news,” Mears said. “They deliver to yahoo and google,” 2 of the biggest search engines.

But what I really took away from Walter Mears’ visit; journalism and reporting is here to stay. As Mears says, “News is disciplined information, striped away and boiled down.”

And that is not going anywhere.