Wisdom

My friend Sharon and I went out for wine and appetizers after work today, talking, along the way to the bar, about family, work, life.

Sharon and I have known each other for more than 20 years. And have been working together for the same amount of time.

So we share a history, reference points that need no explaining. We each know what the other is talking about.

In that way we are like family, which is nothing more than groups of people who share a history, except it's on the basis of blood relation, not life circumstance.

It's interesting to think about that kind of relationship in the context of the where Sharon and I work. A newspaper called the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

A newspaper, more than most businesses, relies on the institutional wisdom, the family wisdom, if you will, that is shared among the reporters, editors and photographers who tell the stories for it each day.

As you tell stories about a place over the years, you acquire a knowledge of people. People who have influence, people who simply know things, people who are empathetic enough or opinionated enough that they can talk about many things.

This is good and it is bad. Good, because this knowledge gives your reporting breadth, bad, because after a time, you begin to rely on the same people. You end up with boilerplate.

No matter. If you live in a community and read a newspaper, in print or online, think about the work of the people whose names are attached to the stories, the photographs, the videos. They are repositories of received, conventional and family wisdom. And they have value because they are associated with a newspaper, something that has a cachet as a place for information.

A place where people call people. Ask questions. Call more people. Ask more questions. Sit. Think. Talk to others face to face. Condense information. Write. Re-write. Make more phone calls. Answer an editor's questions.

Then, and only then. Tell a story.

And then:

Think about it overnight. Come up with a follow up story idea asking all the questions you missed the first time.

If newspapers could download their reporters' and photographers' brains, that would be so much more valuable than keeping their contacts.

A contact to a new person is just a phone number or an e-mail address. Not a relationship.

And relationships are formed in families, of blood or circumstance, whose essential component is the rich medium of human contact.

Eyes, mouths, ears, noses, fingers, sharing contact, has got to be the finest technology of all. Because, pretty much, there's not much room for miscommunication.