The World is Talking. Global Politics

I'm in the middle of revamping my JRN270 Introduction to Journalism class. I'll be using a new book this semester called News Reporting and Writing. And I'll no longer have my students write for the Bang It Out! blog. Instead, I'll require all students in all of my classes to have their own media blogs. More on this later.

Today I'm interested in quotes. What prompts my interest is chapter 4 "In Their Own words." I have a question: Why do journalists use direct quotations from sources?

I'm not at all satisfied with many of the answers to that question from the chapter. For example:

"Crisp, succinct, meaningful quotes spice up any story."

"Direct quotes add color and credibility to your story."

"Direct quotes provide a story with a change of pace, a breath of air. They also loosen up a clump of dense type."

"Be on the lookout for the clever, the colorful, the colloquial."

"A story with no quotes often lacks life and substance."

Hmmmmmmmm...

I'm bracketing feature writing out of this discussion. I'm concerned here instead with something usually identified as news (although the definition is certainly problematic). The quote above that mentions credibility comes closest to my understanding of why journalists should use quotes (not necessarily why they do use them). It's then easy to understand why I completely reject the idea in the last quote that (news) stories without them lack "life and substance." I think credibility should be the primary reason to use a direct quote in a news story. Spice and color and crispness and succictitude and cleverness and colloquialicity etc. etc. should play no role at all.

(That is unless the quote itself is news, e.g. some presidential candidate says something particularly ________.)

This might be a good time to re-visit my 3-part series on the topic of what quotes mean: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

There's good advice in this chapter, too. I'm not dissing the whole thing. For example, this needs to be tattooed on the forehead of every journalist in America (pro and citizen alike): "When someone important says something important but perhaps false, putting the material in quotes does not relieve you of the responsibility for the inaccuracies." Exactly. That's part of the discipline of verification.

This chapter also offers one of the best discussions that I have ever read in a textbook about changing/editing quotes to conform to "standard" English. The authors present the subject in (something like) all its complication. And they come down (mostly) on the side of editing to conform.

I'm long ago on the record for editing quotes to conform to "standard" English because we still teach people in this country that speaking and writing "errors" are a black mark on one's soul and a sure indication of utter stupidity. This is a convenient way to marginalize people by dialect (race and class)--you don't have to actually think about what they are saying!

Tags: journalism, rhetoric, politics