Note to Journalists: Be a Reporter, Not a Recorder

-first published in Substack blog “The “Last Editor” on September 17, 2025

It’s bad enough that sometimes we don’t ask the right questions; far worse than that, sometimes we don’t ask any questions at all.

Journalists (and retired professors) are the harshest critics when they consume the news. I am no exception. Whether I’m watching a newscast or reading a story online, I have a silent string of criticism running in my head: Where’s the answer to this? Why didn’t they ask that? How could they possibly miss that angle?

This played out in a particularly frustrating way recently. I live in California, meaning I’m now caught up in the response to Republican moves in Texas to further gerrymander its congressional districts to deliver more Republican seats in the 2026 midterms. California’s governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, responded to the Texas move by asking California voters to temporarily suspend the state’s constitutionally established nonpartisan redistricting commission in favor of allowing the state legislature (which has a Democratic supermajority) to gerrymander California’s congressional districts from 2026 through 2030. Voters must approve the change here in California because of the commission’s constitutional nature, as opposed to Texas where its Republican-majority legislature could make the change all on its own.

California votes heavily Democratic—both U.S. senators and every statewide office holder is a Democrat—so it would seem Newsom’s plan is assured to pass. But California Democrats find themselves with mixed feelings. They want to live by Michelle Obama’s 2016 slogan, “When they go low, we go high,” but are tired of what they see as Republicans changing the rules in their own favor while Democrats “play fair” and have their lunch handed to them over and over again. Still, there’s an icky feeling across the state over embracing extreme gerrymandering after voting to reduce it just 15 years ago when the redistricting commission was formed.

As I follow the story—and think about how I want to vote—one very important fact was always missing.

In EVERY story I could find about Proposition 50, the ballot proposal that would allow the changes. I could not find out anywhere whether it would take a simple majority of “yes” votes to pass the measure, or if it would take some supermajority such as a 4/7ths or 2/3rds vote to pass.

I became obsessed with trying to find this fact, first poring over all the news articles I could find and, coming up short there, trying to find it on state government web sites. With no luck at any of those sources, I ended up texting a Mizzou alum working as a TV reporter in San Francisco. She’s been covering the issue and I thought she would know. It turned out she didn’t, but was able to reach the right person to find out (it’s a simple majority vote).

I may be the one person in America best equipped to have his own team of concierge reporters who can answer any of his story questions, it shouldn’t work that way.

After all, I have thousands of former students in newsroom across the country. But that’s not really how this is supposed to work. Too often, I see stories missing the proper context and, worse yet, where I don’t think the proper questions have ever been asked.

I blame some of this on the sources, of course. We’ve moved away from a time when news conferences were actually a chance to ask questions. Now, many are just briefings during which statements are read, but no one takes questions. Public officials increasingly shield themselves from reporters through layers of spokespeople and communication offices. Sit-down interviews are rarer than a Palm Springs snowstorm and requests to meet directly with officials for interviews are often met with scorn by the media relations phalanx surrounding most of those in power.

But we can’t blame everything on the people we cover.

When I watch a live news conference that actually allows questions, I don’t always hear the ones we should be asking. Reporters get bogged down in the what, when and where—all important questions—and don’t ask enough about the who, the how and especially the why. As a faculty editor at KOMU-TV, I have vivid memories of editing student reporters’ scripts and coming upon unanswered questions. I would usually ask something like, “What did Politician X say about Issue Y?” The reporter would quickly reply, “He didn’t talk about that,” to which I would respond, “Did you ask about it?” The response to that question usually came a little more slowly, a sheepish shrug accompanied by “No.”

This happened often enough I developed a catchphrase with which I would respond when I knew a reporter had gone to a news conference, recorded everything, but never asked the right questions or pressed the sources for more. I would say, “Be a reporter, not a recorder.” By that I meant that we don’t send reporters to news conferences (or stories in general) just to record everything they see and hear and come back to regurgitate it, unmediated, to the audience. If that’s all we needed, we could streamline the process and send an automated camera by itself to record and beam the footage directly to the audience. Our viewers and readers needs a reporter there to ask hard questions, follow up with harder questions and get down to the bottom of how things happened and why they happened. It takes a sharp mind that’s giving the sources 100 percent of its attention. This is no automated process.

If we can get journalists to make this conversion from recorder back to reporter, here’s where they should focus their newly reawakened skills.

Ask follow-up questions: This may be my biggest complaint. When a source answers a question, there’s almost always a need for a follow up. You wouldn’t have a conversation in which each person made a statement and then you never talked about it again. An interview should work like a conversation, flowing naturally to dive deeper into the topics raised.

Get to the why: Stories almost always include a decent telling of what happened, where it happened, when it happened and who was involved. But they often lack details about why it happened. Why something happened can often help us tell the story of who’s to blame for a problem—and that’s why sources want to hide it. Work hardest on this skill.

Press to talk to those in power, not the spokespeople: I used to tell my classes that if you go to the hospital to get tests for some serious ailment, you don’t want a spokesperson who isn’t a doctor and didn’t go to medical school to give you the results. But we settle for listening to people with no subject matter expertise speak for those in charge daily. Bypass the spokespeople when you can and go right to the source. Ambush them if you must.

Don’t be afraid to go back and ask more questions: Reporting is a multistep process. If you don’t get everything you need the first time, go back and ask again. Sometimes you don’t know what’s missing until the story starts to shape up. If you need more time to report from your producer or editor, ask for it. You’ll get it more often than you think.

Give the viewer context to make sense: Collecting information isn’t your only job. We can’t air or publish everything we gather. We must sift through it, ranks its importance, connect it to prior events to give it meaning and package all that in a way the audience can understand. This is perhaps the most important job for a reporter—and something a recorder can’t do.

Reading a story in which all my questions are answered, all the W’s are included and the report actually talks to the people central to the issue should be commonplace. The fact it isn’t shows we have work to do to shut down the recorders and put the reporters back to work again.