Day 2: Murder in the Classroom AKA a Lesson in Verisimilitude
In a Harkness table fashion, the morning started off with meeting the head teacher Ari Goldman, professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Goldman introduced himself and began conversation with asking the students about their interest on journalism and the reasons on why they came to “Writing in the Big City”. One student, Anisa Curry Vietze, a rising junior from Indiana, commented, “I like to think of journalism as a form of activism,” and described her opinions on reporting objectivity.
Another student in the same year, Hailey Napier, from Woodstock, Vermont, described her initial experience with journalism. “I was a part of a multimedia collaborative covering politics this past winter, and it was really interesting covering all the different perspectives that I hadn’t really thought about before,” she related.
The class then had a brief introduction to the nature of modern journalism, and briefly discussed how the media and technology of today is changing the way journalists write their stories. Goldman explored this topic with a song by Bob Dylan called The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.
It begins:
William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’
And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
In this first stanza, Goldman explained that “hard news” often includes a few key beginning facts. Answering Who, What, When, Where, How and Why, a “lede” is the most basic beginning to most journalistic articles. “A lede is like a first date…[It] is like a taste or a summary of what you’re going to write so the reader can decide if they want to read it,” he said.
The class then launched into enthusiastic discussion about the rest of the song and its meaning. “It’s interesting how at the end of the first paragraphs, Dylan sings Take the rag away from your face/ Now ain’t the time for your tears while describing the murder, but in the last stanza, he sings, Bury the rag deep in your face/ For now is the time for you tears for, like the decision,” said Nadiya Elysser, a rising junior from Pennsylvania. “It’s almost like he’s saying the real tragedy isn’t this woman’s murder… it’s the flaws in the system that dealt with her murder.”
Students avidly agreed, relating the song to many current events like the recent Orlando shooting. “A song like this is timeless,” Goldman told the students. “And by playing this song again, we almost bring Hattie back.”
The students ended the day with an exercise in the interview process that gave pairs of students a chance to question and gather information on each other. Using this information, the students were assigned to write a short article on their partner in a traditional journalism style; in class, the students got started laying out their ledes, and were given the task to complete the article by 8:00 PM the next day.
During the interviews, Goldman explained a key quality of reporting: verisimilitude, or to give “a ring of truth” by using quotes and reliable sources to make the story credible. “We’re trying to teach you the means to have rigor, to have a standard,” he said. “We get to go places other people don’t, so we have to tell the story.”
