“The person you talk to on Monday who is a victim of something,” he said, “on Friday, they’re an expert on that.” He keeps the notes in his bag everywhere he goes, and keeping up with people after their story aired has led to those people being sources for future stories.
Pitts writes thank you notes to every subject of a story and to the people who help him out, he said. The lack of diversity in newsrooms, Pitts said, allows these incomplete images to slide by. Often, the people who have jobs are at work, so the news reflects an incomplete image of a community because journalists there may not familiar with what the complete image of that community looks like. When something tragic happens or a crime is committed, journalists rush to the community to get a reaction, he said, and they end up speaking to whomever is home during the day. “Why is the woman with gold teeth on the news?” Pitts asked. Journalists sometimes take the easy way out when they report on communities with which they may be unfamiliar, Pitts said during the community conversation. On the importance of diversity in newsrooms: The more nuanced issues such as race and class are more complicated to cover.Ģ. Journalists are products of America, he said, and America is a “microwave society” that expects things to happen quickly and issues to be fixed quickly. “Race is an incredibly important conversation, but in some ways it can be distracting from the greater conversation that should be had in America, about access to opportunity, about class issues, about the importance of diversity.” Reporters often miss these stories, he said, because they don’t live in the communities they report on.
“Do your job and find it.” The story of Ferguson isn’t just about race, Pitts said, just as no story is that one-dimensional. “There is a Ferguson in every community,” Pitts said during the community conversation, expanding on a point he’d made earlier in the day as well. On finding nuance when reporting on race: Here are five takeaways from Pitts’ Master Class (broadcast live and available in replay on NewsU and his Poynter Institute community conversation, “Race & America,” which was held Friday night.)ġ. “Being a journalist is like being a carpenter. To pick up the habits of people I thought were successful.”ĭuring two events Friday at the Poynter Institute, Pitts shared advice for journalists who might be studying him the way he studied Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer. “I would sit at home and watch the news and study it, and it became like going to the movies, going to a club, that was what I enjoyed doing. When he got his first reporting job in Greenville, North Carolina, he kept learning and trying to get better.
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I would record the morning news programs and the evening news programs,” he said.įrom how to hold a microphone to how to write and construct a story, Pitts learned from watching others in his field.
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So I needed three TV sets, three VCRs, to record ABC, CBS and NBC. I wanted to begin to model successful people, so I wanted to really study it.
“I wanted to be successful in television. When he got his first job on television, he knew he had to work even harder to make it to the network. Now the chief national correspondent for ABC News and co-anchor of “Nightline,” Pitts knew before he could read that he wanted to work as a television reporter on a major network. If you had asked a young Byron Pitts what he wanted to be when he grew up, he wouldn’t have answered with “astronaut” or “firefighter.” His reply, even then, was “’60 Minutes’ reporter.”