In this highly competitive profession that requires courage upon entering what is still essentially a man’s world – newshens happily exploit every avenue that may lead to news, including those denied to male reporters. None of the latter has, for example, has danced yet with a President.
First let me tell you about our organization’s survival kit. You have to act like a lady, think like a man, look like a girl and work like plow horses by day. Women are also expected to look like butterflies by night.
It would help if you knew everybody, went everywhere and missed nothing: make the news by the questions you asked with composure and articulateness. You should be hardworking at all levels, super sensitive to events, compassionate, insatiably curious but kind, deeply sentimental and unafraid to feel the humanity of situations. You should put gossips into a higher plane, throw in a perfect sense of humor. All these, beside whom, Wonder Woman becomes a flavorless character.
There is a great deal of discrimination in this business — some of it not subtle. Men editors don’t take women seriously. Women are often regarded as strident, un-manicured, faintly hysterical (they cry!) …relegated to soft things like health, education or welfare.
The elite of the working women press are political writers/columnists. They write what they think, not just the what, when, where and how. Presidents seek them for advice.
The first one who gets the nod if they want to ask a question at a press conference — they analyze the situation, giving advice to the administration and interpreting the motives of those who are in power for the public. Probably the only women political columnists in our country who might be considered as household names are Kerima Polotan and Ninotchka Rosca.
Most of us do not write to expose frauds and hypocrites. Personally, I do not count warts and blemishes, or weigh feet of clay.
I’ve always felt that public officials are like the rest of the human race. One simply chronicles their hopes, frailties and triumphs with merciful candor and surgical precision, whenever possible — uncluttered by doctrine, theory or catch phrases, in contrast to the sharp use of elbows and footwork that are customary weapons in this competitive trade.
In those days, I struggled at the Journal Group newsroom, overburdened with notes and impressions. My editor cut through my babblings, turning it into one phrase.
Over the years, I have clung to the philosophy of “writing by describing what I saw.”
I write in longhand. I am so primitive, still. I like to see words come out of a pen, as they distribute themselves into clumsy, fugitive sentences. And how, with stylistic struggle, weave themselves until they flow into something lucid.
It took me six hours to describe the President’s temper tantrum. In the next six years, my editor would exhort me, saying “keep it simple, no literary epics.”
I learned to slice, trim and score beats by intuitive understanding. Information is currency, access is power — forget the indigestible topics of the day.
Having spent their lifetimes exacting information from people who often would rather, not give it out, Newshens are petrified when tables are turned and they’re the ones being interviewed.
By the way, I’ve always been driven by drama, (not passion), by beliefs, by truth –- but certainly not by the attitude of the policeman who has a uniform on. “I’ll settle you right now because I’m the press.”
Nothing can be more pathetic than being worse than a male journalist.
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E-mail Mylah at [email protected]