Shirin Parsavand

The specialized journalism students spent a lot of time this week talking about autonomy as it relates to journalists' accountability to their audience (or the "people formerly known as the audience," as Jay Rosen would have it).

We didn't talk much about the ideal of competition and its pitfalls, an area explored by Theodore L. Glasser and Marc Gunther in their essay "The Legacy of Autonomy in American Journalism." But this was the section of the essay that resonated most strongly with me.

Glasser and Gunther argue that "competition promises choice but delivers little of it." The more competition they face, the more newspapers and broadcast media outlets tend to look similar to one another. There is often less freedom to pursue a story off the beaten path or to go after an unusual angle. Instead, a media outlet is engaged in a race to make sure it has every element of a breaking story before the competition does. If it fails, it has to focus on catching up.

Breaking away from the competition was a constant struggle for me when I covered the New York state Capitol for an upstate newspaper, The Daily Gazette of Schenectady. I was the sole Capitol reporter for the paper, and I was up against three reporters at my main competitor, the Times Union of Albany. I managed to break some stories on issues affecting the region, but could have served readers better if I had spent more time cultivating sources and less time focused on what the competition had.

More recently I faced different challenges, and less direct competition, as an education reporter at The Press-Enterprise in Riverside. But on occasion, I'd have to jump on a story the editors spotted in another California newspaper when I would have preferred taking more time to find a different approach or ignoring the story entirely.

One example of this came last year, when the Brookings Institution published a report casting doubt on a new California requirement that all eighth-graders enroll in algebra. The report was released on a Monday and I learned about it from the front page of the PE, which carried a teaser for an AP story that ran inside the A-section. An editor who read the Los Angeles Times story on the report still wanted me to write a story for the next day. In my story, I was able to make a point I felt was overlooked in most of the other coverage of the study: the study didn't show that students would have been better off in basic math classes than in algebra. Still, I didn't think readers were served by stories on the same study on consecutive days.

Stories like these result from what Glasser and Gunther term an "intramural contest" that may matter in newsrooms but not to readers, viewers and listeners. The contest only matters to them when it cheats them of the stories they might get otherwise.

Stay in the moment.

That's what Associate Professor Sandy Tolan urged Wednesday as he led a group of graduate journalism students at USC on a tour of downtown Los Angeles and the neighborhoods surrounding it.

I tried to take that advice, while at the same time asking myself questions about what I was seeing. In Chinatown, I saw elderly men sitting alone on benches near closed shops along a deserted street,  and I wondered what drew them there. At the Vibiana cathedral, I sat on the floor of the former worship space and thought about what it must have felt like to kneel in the confessionals lining the room. On the bus, I noticed a boy drop his quarter into the waste basket instead of the coin slot, then walk by with a rueful look. I wondered what went through the boy's mind, and whether he worried about his mistake even after the bus driver let him know it was fine.

Maybe if I had to put together a daily story on the field trip, I would have been focused on determining whether I saw any evidence of recent change in the neighborhoods we toured, or on whether I could pull together the disparate elements of the day into a coherent narrative. Instead I noticed small details, any one of which could have led me to a story.

My exploration of downtown LA came the day after Professor Michael Parks talked about the idea of journalists becoming their own brand. I've always resisted this idea, which felt to me more like part of the world of  marketing than journalism. I wanted to have my sources trust me and my readers see my work as valuable, but I felt that would come from the work I did and the respect I showed others.

I've also tended to associate the idea of branding with arrogance and shallowness - the very qualities that make it hard to stay in the moment and to see others' perspectives.

Maybe I'm guilty of some shallow thinking myself on the concept of branding, though. A journalist won't be able to develop a brand unless she can first give readers something of value - whether it's analysis based on experience or the stories that no one else is telling. Drawing readers to those stories was not the responsibility of journalists working for institutional media, but it may well be necessary for most journalists in the future.

But before pulling in readers, they have to find their material. And that requires staying in the moment.

Reporters who are sticklers for accuracy in quoting a subject can still run into trouble when quoting someone who is speaking another language.

In a class discussion Thursday, we talked about what to do when a literal translation of an idiom doesn't capture the essence of what is meant, but substituting another figure of speech doesn't quite seem right either.

At a time when, as Professor Roberto Suro said, "there are a zillion watchdogs ... looking to point out errors by journalists," this problem can dog news agencies. Our discussion reminded me of case in 2005, when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at an anti-Zionist conference and called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." At least that was the quote used by the New York Times and other news outlets, and it continued to be widely quoted long after the speech.

The trouble is, that wasn't exactly what Ahmadinejad said, and at least one Middle East expert thought it implied a more aggressive stance than he actually took in the speech. Middle East specialist Juan Cole wrote that the phrase wrongly "gives the impression that he (Ahmadinejad) wants to play Hitler to Israel's Poland." Cole noted that Ahmadinejad was quoting something Ayatollah Khomeini had said years earlier, and said a more accurate translation of the quote is this: "The occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time."

His criticism caused the New York Times to look into the translation, and it found that the word "map" in fact would have been better translated as "time" or "pages of time."  Nonetheless, the Times stood by the accuracy of the original quote, deputy foreign editor Ethan Bronner told Brooke Gladstone of NPR's On the Media.

Idioms are always difficult to translate, and as Bronner pointed out, the Iranian foreign minister did not dispute the translation when he was questioned about the infamous phrase. Still, perhaps this case shows that journalists should avoid converting foreign speakers' comments into American idioms, since readers tend to think of them as exact quotes. Even if Ahmadinejad has made other threatening comments toward Israel, it seems wrong for people to think that he called for wiping it away when he was really quoting an expectation that it would someday disappear.

I've thought a lot lately about the problems Howard Gillman, dean of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, complained about Tuesday when he spoke to the specialized journalism students at USC. I'm not sure whether journalists fall into the trap of the "dominant script" any more than they did in the past. I was glad to hear Geneva Overholser, director of the Annenberg journalism school, point out that it certainly happened during the 1980s with the reporting on President Reagan's "Star Wars" initiative. Whether or not journalists hew to the dominant script even more often now, I did see a greater danger of that over the last couple of years, as staff cutbacks at the paper where I worked led to more editor-assigned stories. The ideas for those stories usually came from other newspapers. It was difficult in those assigned stories to depart from the dominant script set by the paper that originated the story, even if that script was flawed. Maybe here the phrase "echo chamber" would be more appropriate.