I had the chance Thursday to interview John McLoughlin, reporter and managing editor at WTEN, for an article I wrote about his resigning from the network after 39 years. It’s not very often I have someone with his reputation and experience on the phone at full attention, so I took the opportunity to ask him about his career and the journalism industry. Below are some of the quotes that didn’t make it in the story I wrote for The Record.
On the stories that stuck out over the years:
Some of the stories you remember are not the biggest ones. Sometimes it’s the smaller stories that make more of an impression on you. I wrote a story in Rochester, out in a rural part of the Rochester area in 1968 and they were talking about integration and busing. Out of the whole audience there was one black couple sitting in the back. After all the white people got up and used all the clichés about integration and their opposition to it, this black guy stood up, and I can remember his name, Tal Moore, he got up and talked, and people were shocked, because they didn’t even know a black man was there. He talked about how we all just need to get to know each other. That story to me — and I was in the newspaper business for about nine years — to me that was the best story I ever wrote. The guy was just eloquent, people applauded him after he talked. And again, it was not the biggest story in the world, but it’s a story I have clippings of, and I’ll always have clippings of it.
On how the industry has changed:
The economics of the business have changed a lot. The shift in the choices that are being made by readers and listeners of radio have changed. Certainly the technology of television has changed tremendously, it’s still changing. When I first started we were still using film. It was a lot more difficult at the time.
On what hasn’t changed:
The basic principles of the business have not changed. The principles of fairness, accuracy and thoroughness, they haven’t changed, but the tools have changed. In some ways it’s better, in a lot of ways there are problems because the economics are such that it’s difficult to run a newspaper or a TV station, given the fiscal constraints. It’s difficult to deliver as good a product as you did in the past. By the same token, I think there are a lot of positive things that are happening. A lot of younger people are coming into the business who are better educated than we ever were. There are pluses and minuses. It’s not that things have gotten worse, it’s just that they’ve changed. Nobody knows how things are going to be – your bosses don’t know, my bosses don’t know, how it’s going to be 25, 30 years from now.
On learning how to be a reporter:
A lot of [the younger journalists] went to journalism school where they took courses in media ethics and things like that. We learned from people who were already on the job. There were always the older, experienced reporters and that’s how we learned. They’re the ones who told you, ‘hey, we don’t do that’, or ‘that’s not what newspeople do’, ‘you’re story is not as fair or as balanced as it should be’. It’s just a question of where you learned it. I think a lot of kids are getting it from a college where we used to get it from the curmudgeons in the newsroom, the old men and women who were there for years before you arrived.
On covering his hometown:
It’s fantastic. It’s one of the reasons I came back from Rochester. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle when I worked there was an excellent newspaper and it was really a writer’s newspaper. They encouraged creative writing. But, I missed Albany and Troy. I missed covering people that I knew and I missed covering the political scene here in Albany and Troy. There ain’t no politics like the Capital District, I tell you. You go to Buffalo, Rochester, any place in the state, it’s not like here. You see what’s going on. There’s always a scandal, always something popping.
On seeing it all:
That’s the thing about it, you haven’t seen it all. That’s what I like about this business. A lot of it I’ve seen and it’s repetitive, but there’s always something new. There’s always a new angle to a story or new people on the scene who are going to do things differently. That’s news reporting — the idea that it’s different. It’s news. It’s different every day I go in. I don’t want to know what I’m going to be doing tomorrow. I like to take it as it comes and see what tomorrow’s story is.
Great quotes. I worked alongside John for more than 30 years and he is one of a kind. People gravitate to him and feed him stories. I remember standing outside the Federal courthouse waiting for a verdict and probably a dozen people stopped to talk and give him story ideas. He connected with people and that is what makes a journalist successful. Many memories.
[...] a small daily newspaper). But our chat was too great not to share. Inspired by my coworker Cecelia, who posted a transcript of a memorable, too-long-for-print interview over at her own blog, I’d like to post some [...]