|
Journalists, what was your most shocking discovery?
########################################################################
|u/Predator_ - 8 hours
|
|Photojournalist here: Photographed an apartment fire as it was going
|on. Photos published. Was sent back the next morning for a presser with
|the PIO. Got some photos of the inside of the remains of one of the
|apartments. There was a crib inside, still smoldering. The photo desk
|was able tell me the remains of a baby were still in it. I hadn't even
|realized it. So sad and horrifying.
|u/MistakeBeginning664 - 8 hours
|
|Omg I'm so sorry you had to see that
|u/Predator_ - 8 hours
|
|I appreciate it. Unfortunately, I've heard and seen far worse.
|u/_sith_lord - 5 hours
|
|Like what? If I can ask
|u/Predator_ - 5 hours
|
|I've covered an active bank robbery, active hostage situations,
|an active school shooting, covered the aftermath of that
|shooting for months, had to do portraits of surviving family
|members after murders (different assignments), politics,
|protests, etc. The assignments aren't all hard and heavy. I
|get to do a lot of fun stuff, too. Though a big part of the job
|is knowing how to compartmentalize and how to properly unpack
|it all.
|u/mostbeautifulmoment - 1 hour
|
|It was very scary, thank you!
|u/very_large_ears - 7 hours
|
|The chair of the county’s alcoholic beverage control board was taking
|bribes from liquor producers to put their product on the shelves. My
|stories forced him to resign.
|u/AcidTraffik - 7 hours
|
|So you're just happy to put hard working, God fearing, crooked
|politicians and appointees out of work then I see... For shame! /s
|u/Soace_Space_Station - 6 hours
|
|The dude above you is so evil right? What am I supposed to do when
|I can barely get by my 3.2 million dollar monthly salary and he
|steals it!!!
|u/AcidTraffik - 6 hours
|
|He’s not even stealing it! Literally just ruining the fun for
|everyone else! It’s not like he gets your grossly overinflated
|wages and bribe money once you lose out on them for like *no
|reason at all barely…* Probably just jealous, amirite?
|u/CaptainPeachfuzz - 5 hours
|
|Wait...but what were the outback coupons for?
|u/jasonfintips - 6 hours
|
|Ours years ago was picking high end baffles for personal consumption
|or selling.
|u/Admirable_Excuse_818 - 5 hours
|
|Not all heroes wear capes, some wield pens sharper than any blade.
|I'm proud of you.
|u/DelightFive - 7 hours
|
|Nice.
|u/mdwilsonsa - 8 hours
|
|Went to a welfare check off a scanner call based on a report of a foul
|odor coming from an abandoned lot in a rougher side of town. I rolled
|up and IMMEDIATELY knew there was a body, but the crime scene guys
|hadn’t arrived yet so everyone was just kind of milling around and
|gagging. The PIO even came over to me and said “I don’t do bodies” and
|rolled out until they had more to go on. Not five minutes later, a
|little stray dog comes running up to me and group of a couple of
|officers and reporters and gets a few pets before he drops a human
|finger with intricate nail work out of his mouth. The dog had been
|digging a lot. That’s how the body got uncovered. He ran back over and
|kept working, which is how police found the shallow grave. Turns out
|that person was one of six, but police did not want to scare people by
|admitting there was a serial killer. The guy eventually got arrested
|for a separate killing.
|u/Hopeful-Letter6849 - 5 hours
|
|This is legit like a horror story/opening of a law and order episode
|u/TheNifflerKing - 5 hours
|
|Buh Buhhhhhh
|u/Klem_Colorado - 6 hours
|
|"Whatcha pointing at boy, huh, huh?"
|u/Burdiac - 6 hours
|
|Whole new meaning of “little Jimmy is in the well?”
|u/Davesterific - 5 hours
|
|We’ll, most of him. Ruff ruff.
|u/llamawc77 - 5 hours
|
|Where was this?
|u/Villebilly - 4 hours
|
|I’m guessing Springfield Massachusetts. This sounds familiar.
|u/Bezbozny - 3 hours
|
|I think you got it backwards, here the *dogs* were eating the
|*people*
|u/AbeFromanSassageKing - 1 hour
|
|The DAWGS are eating the PEOPLE of the CATS that live there!!
|u/Bezbozny - 1 hour
|
|EAT-EAT THE PEOPLE EAT-EAT THE PEOPLE🎶
|u/OmniaLoca - 7 hours
|
|That's wild
|u/DudeThatsAGG - 2 hours
|
|“Directed by David Lynch”
|u/Bezbozny - 3 hours
|
|What happened to the dog? Did it belong to the killer? Or did he just
|find the body? Considering what I know of the government, I feel like
|there's some regulation like "If an animal has tasted human flesh it
|automatically gets put down" or something, but I'm just guessing. If
|he belonged to the killer its one thing because for all we know the
|guy was actually feeding it to the dog or something sick like that,
|but if he was just a good boy who found the body i worry for him.
|u/Uwofpeace - 3 hours
|
|"I feel like there's some regulation like "If an animal has tasted
|human flesh it automatically gets put down" or something"----hold
|up, what??
|u/Emperor_Mao - 32 minutes
|
|um... lol. I would say that is not a thing.
|u/catullus-sixteen - 34 minutes
|
|Scully has it.
|u/Astronaut_Chicken - 2 hours
|
|And then then someone on the forensic team adopted the diligent
|little fella good story the end!
|u/BrettTheShitmanShart - 5 hours
|
|I was a young intern at a major market newspaper back when people
|bought newspapers out of boxes. I wrote a tongue-in-cheek puff piece
|about a new "smellless" cigarette where I none too subtly tried to bash
|the entire industry. I interviewed a tobacco exec who, on tape, said
|that menthol cigarettes are preferred by Black people because "they
|prefer stronger tastes like fried chicken and watermelon." I couldn't
|believe I'd gotten this nakedly racist quote on tape — incredible! I
|put it in the piece and was surprised when my editor took it out. So I
|put it back in. And she took it out again and said "there's no way we
|can print that." I protested that I had it on tape — ON TAPE! — but
|that made no difference. The piece ended up being quite soft, its
|critique as dry as a raised eyebrow. I wouldn't read Ben Bagdickian's
|"Media Monopoly" until years later, where I learned about the newspaper
|industry's long relationship with tobacco advertising, explaining why
|any news piece about tobacco always placed doctors and scientists
|across from tobacco industry spokespeople as if this was some sort of
|fair and equal "factual" treatment. That little damning quote was
|never going to see the light of day.
|u/catalinaislandfox - 4 hours
|
|That sounds incredibly infuriating.
|u/fubo - 3 hours
|
|Tobacco and racism? Was this in a country founded by slave-raping
|tobacco planters or something?
|u/FalseListen - 2 hours
|
|Do you still have the tape? You could blast out the audio on reddit
|u/I_am_not_groot - 5 hours
|
|I started my career at the small paper in my hometown and it shocked me
|that the bigger city TV news orgs would just straight up copy/paste
|plagiarize my stories whenever I wrote about anything interesting (they
|didn't publish it from the AP wire, they just copy/pasted my exact
|words under a different byline). Then we'd get calls from locals about
|that same story, saying they'd seen it on the evening news and asking
|why we hadn't covered it yet. 😤 None of my coworkers at the paper were
|at all surprised by this, they said it happened all the time.
|Throughout my career in journalism, I saw print journalists surfacing
|stories by doing the hard work, going to the council meetings, tracking
|down sources, and I saw local TV stations just rewriting and re-running
|those stories as if it was their own original reporting. The general
|consensus in the community was that print journalism was outdated and
|had run its course, but I rarely saw TV news stations invest in primary
|reporting (TV news stations absolutely do break stories and many do
|very valuable work, especially at the national level, but at the local
|station level it seemed like they just weren't willing to put in the
|same resources). The whole media pyramid scheme seemed to rely on the
|local newspaper staff, which were actively being bled dry and
|continually forced to cut staff by the media conglomerates that owned
|them. That was 10 years or so ago. Maybe by now the trend has run its
|course and no one has the resources to do much primary local reporting
|anymore.
|u/Spike_Milligoon - 3 hours
|
|What you write is at the end there is very true. Also bad for
|democracy. Local newspapers used to hold local govt to account, and
|so many other things. Now that is less so. Authorities can get away
|with more and newsdesks largely rely on social media to source stuff
|- basically becoming what the tv orgs were to print.
|u/NinjaBreadManOO - 3 hours
|
|To be honest I actually think that print journalism especially for
|small publications should genuinely be a government subsidised thing
|in this day and age. It's such a crucial component of society and
|as you said it is used by larger markets (which should be giving it
|the recognition). And, just letting it fail because of profit/costs
|will have a genuine negative impact later on. I'd put it in there
|with libraries as operations that are ignored but crucial for
|societies to grow and support the population.
|u/Gladyskravitz99 - 6 hours
|
|I discovered I could not for the life of me investigate anything more
|complicated than a child's riddle, wouldn't know a conspiracy if I
|tripped over it, and absolutely despise confrontation.
|u/sunflow3r- - 6 hours
|
|reads like a late 90s/early 2000s romp
|u/Covenent125 - 8 hours
|
|How much journalist gets paid. unless you come from money that can
|support you, it pays crap.
|u/Butter-is-Better - 6 hours
|
|I was working in a gift/novelty shop during college and took a pay
|cut to work at a newspaper. With a degree and published pieces
|already under my belt. I made more in retail.
|u/wheels-of-confusion - 2 minutes
|
|A journalist with a masters degree earns less per hour than a
|retail worker in Portugal.
|u/sleightofhand0 - 4 hours
|
|At this point, all journalists do is provide content for podcasters,
|opinion writers, and other people who actually make money.
|u/Admirable_Excuse_818 - 5 hours
|
|It's even worse when I think about the Journalists who want to do
|world changing work and get stuck writing garbage that 'enrages and
|engages'/'if it bleeds it leads' as a journalism professor I had once
|said T\_T
|u/KeepAwaySynonym - 8 hours
|
|That's crazy they pay the independently wealthy jouenalists more.
|u/FullSendLemming - 7 hours
|
|They don’t of course. However, if you don’t come from money, then
|you will not survive the internship, traineeship/early part of your
|career. Only then can you become an accomplished and well-paid
|journalist. The road is pretty much shut for someone who can’t
|support themselves during the early part of their career while they
|forge a name for themselves.
|u/saturnspritr - 6 hours
|
|Reminds me of grad school, I eventually had to drop out. I was
|one of the only people in my class that had a job. And had to
|have a job to support myself. And nearly everyone either lived at
|home with their parents or on a property owned by their parents.
|My parents weren’t paying for shit and had nothing to do with my
|living situation. I just couldn’t do it on top of working a full
|time job, I was so burned out and feeling like a failure by the
|end.
|u/SirVeritas79 - 7 hours
|
|Nothing with any stories, but the reality of how predetermined
|television news actually is. A huge portion is just pick and pull from
|the national wires. And so much of what's covered is basically blotter
|fodder. Only time you'd see Black folks was crime. Even on the weekend
|when news is notably much less intense. And seeing how the news helps
|establish the way people are seen was jarring for me. Especially since
|I had no desire to do hard news and wanted to work in sports.
|u/Imhal9000 - 5 hours
|
|Very similar as a sports photographer who’s also a person of colour.
|I worked in Australia but our media landscape is somewhat similar to
|the USA
|u/SirVeritas79 - 4 hours
|
|I’ve heard. Ironically one of my friends from college who also
|worked in the business gave up her career to be with a wealthy dude
|from Perth…she’s been out there for almost 15 years now.
|u/Imhal9000 - 4 hours
|
|Rupert Murdoch is originally from Perth too. He also owns our
|media landscape
|u/Imhal9000 - 4 hours
|
|That’s where I live 😅
|u/VH5150OU812 - 7 hours
|
|That training for a career in journalism was not the path to riches I
|had hoped for.
|u/gough_whitlam - 4 hours
|
|Not story related, but an industry observation. It's amazing how
|people easily assume journalists are often these very clever and
|devious types pushing specific thought-through political agendas. The
|truth is, journalists are human. They can be surprisingly dumb. They
|make mistakes. They have blind spots. It's just like a regular office
|job environment, but instead of writing private reports and processing
|admin documents your colleague's work is public and about summarising
|events or sharing their mixed bag of opinions.
|u/castrophone - 7 hours
|
|Not necessarily something I personally discovered, but if you remember
|the mass shootings in Dallas in 2016, as a social media reporter, I saw
|many, many videos of people being shot at and being shot. I still get a
|little panicky when I think about it. And I often think about the
|people who actually filmed those videos. Truly chilling. It just
|dawned on me that I stopped enjoying fireworks after that.
|u/effigyoma - 5 hours
|
|Police often lie to the press to save face for crime victims who
|weren't exactly up to lawful things themselves--if they're good looking
|and white. A white woman who was "randomly killed in the woods while
|working on an art project" actually had a seizure during a drugs for
|sex trade and the guy freaked out and killed her. Had the community
|terrified there was a random guy running around people killing random
|women for a few days there when the police figured it out pretty much
|right away. A similar thing happened to a black woman the same age a
|few years later and the cops told the press the truth immediately.
|The truth usually comes out through official court records, but by that
|time the press had to move on to detailed reporting on other, more
|recent stories, so usually all we would report was the verdict and
|sentencing. Newsrooms tend to be very understaffed, especially in
|smaller markets.
|u/Cosmiccomie - 6 hours
|
|Not a journalist but a P.I. who, in this instance, wrote the estate's
|press release - was hired to find a missing child of a quasi-prominent
|family by the parents (particularly the father). The father kidnapped
|the daughter while prepping to divorce his wife.
|u/arlington_hick - 3 hours
|
|Independent Domestic Combat Journalist here, I cover Riots, Uprisings,
|and Protests within the United States. I've covered headline events
|during Occupy, Ferguson/BLM 2014, Unite The Right 2, Minneapolis/
|George Floyd in 2020, and the United States Capitol Insurrection.
|The biggest shock for me that I've discovered has been when I review
|footage. Sometimes my camera is pointed in a direction while my focus
|is else where. There was a moment on Novemeber 14, 2020 in Washington
|DC. It was just after dark and Proud Boys and Antifascists were both
|marching and kinda zig zaging a few hot spots. The police cleared out
|of the area and hung back. Moments later the two demonstrations
|collided head on. A full on brawl ensued just a block from the J. Edgar
|Hoover building of the FBI. I was just entering the shield wall
|getting footage as the initial contact was made. There had bottles
|being thrown, mace being deployed, and weapons being swung. The brawl
|only lasted 3-5 minutes before police showed back up and separated
|everyone. It wasn't until June of 2022 that I went back and
|rewatched some of my footage from that night. The reason being the
|Senate Committee Hearings for the Events of January 6th, 2021 were
|beginning. I sat and went through everything I had about the Proud
|Boys. What I found was Enrique Tarrio throwing punches in that brawl,
|at least until he noticed cameras were on him. I later matched his
|outfit to other footage friends and colleagues had recorded. I sat
|there just in disbelief that this Treasonist little fuck, really was
|able to lead the groups who later went on the storm the Halls of
|Democary, and no one had noticed. Even I hadn't noticed that he was
|front and center for the brawl where people sustained injuries.
|Tl;dr : cover riots, recorded Enrquie Tarrio of the Proud Boys throwing
|punches in a brawling 2020 when looking over footage day Senate
|Commitee hearing for Jan 6th started. [Link To Thread about matching
|outfits/video](https://x.com/StreamerWayward/status/1535314213987667975
|?t=Xb07GXk9TchtXApfY26e-Q&s=19)
|u/Caption-writer16 - 3 hours
|
|That a lot journalists aren’t as intelligent as I thought they were
|u/Capt_MoMorg - 5 hours
|
|The lack of journalism jobs there are. 😒
|u/pembunuhcahaya - 5 hours
|
|I was a journalist intern in mainstream media last semester. I wrote
|general news, but usually about the politician and the current
|political affair. - Most journalists are being paid less. That made
|it easy for the govt to bribe them, but they usually use the term
|"envelope money". I received it once, but then give it back, I learn
|the hard way, hehe. - I know our journalism quality is bad, but I
|don't know if it was that bad. A lot of issues are made up by the
|journalists. It's easy for them to use misleading information to trap a
|public figure to say something nasty. All for the engagement. - I got
|a threat from the assistant of an ex-president once for my harmless
|question. They're not joking. - As an intern, some people thought it's
|okay to hijack my works. Some people copy pasted my stories, some
|people even shamelessly asked me about things that I report before it's
|being published. Idk where they get my contact. I put a "don't trust
|the media" as my pf for that time period because I feel like sometimes
|I'm contributed in the fear mongering lol.
|u/sally_says - 2 hours
|
|In which country we're you based as an intern? >I was a journalist
|intern in mainstream media I'm struggling with this line because
|saying you "work in mainstream media" doesn't make sense to me. If I
|worked at a newspaper, radio or TV station, popular or not, I would
|just say that's where I worked. I wouldn't & have never heard anyone
|else in the industry say they 'worked in mainstream media', which
|isn't the mainstream anymore anyway. It's as strange to me as someone
|saying they 'work in big pharma'. I'm also surprised that an intern
|would get an envelope of money since - in my experience anyway -
|their stories would be vetted and they couldn't publish anything on
|their own.
|u/pembunuhcahaya - 1 hour
|
|Mainstream media is how they called a big media company with every
|product; TV, digital newspaper, etc. I'm in Southeast Asia. They
|mostly don't know that we're an intern. We bought an ID just like a
|regular journalist. But yes, we can't publish anything on our own,
|we have an editor. That envelope money is usually given to everyone
|in the room (in my experience, it's a place where we can't go
|without an invitation).
|u/NOISY_SUN - 5 hours
|
|As a career journalist for 20 years, this is all bullshit and not
|true. At least in the US.
|u/pembunuhcahaya - 5 hours
|
|20 years of career and still thought the world revolves around US?
|u/NOISY_SUN - 5 hours
|
|Reddit is an American platform, most references in English to the
|“mainstream media” on Reddit encompass US outlets. It’s nice you
|felt you learned something in your internship.
|u/jamesrave - 5 hours
|
|Reddit is a global platform owned and operated in the US. 48%
|of Reddit users are based in the US, meaning 52% are not. So
|the majority of users are not American. 2/3 of Reddit users
|are male, but e wouldn’t say it’s a men’s platform, would we?
|u/pembunuhcahaya - 5 hours
|
|What I mean to say is, just because you didn't experience it,
|doesn't mean it's "bullshit". It's just like you're trying to
|close your eyes to someone's experience, which is so weird
|because you're a journalist and should investigate before
|saying something.
|u/ouronin - 5 hours
|
|I was the photog in the chopper in Denver for the Ryan Stone police
|chase. https://youtu.be/uEY0aT020PQ?si=TTvGDS3cIUQ8QObe
|u/LiveClimbRepeat - 6 hours
|
|ITT: doxing journalists
|